[Zope] data.fs flushing

[Gregor]

OK, here's my situation.  I'm running a windows 98 machine (i.e., not very
stable) with multiple windows users.  Therefore, the current user occasionally
gets logged out, or the machine itself crashes, killing the zope process.  The
server does generally get restarted, so uptime is not a problem with this
setup.

Since the database appears to only be saved to disk during a shutdown or a
pack, this basically means that at irregular (but frequent) times out of my
control, the database can be easily lost.  The person logging out of the
current account does not have (nor should have) the access to Zope's
management interface needed to do a shutdown on the server or a pack of the
database.

Since I have set up the ability for some remote users to do some content
management, and they might do this at literally any time without my knowledge,
this is a problem.  Even the logs do not help; the logs apparently disappear
in such a situation (not tested fully), so I have no way of knowing even THAT
the users have changed something, much less what.


What I basically am wondering is if there is a way to force Zope to flush the
database to disk at periodic intervals, whether by packing the database (undo
is not as important to me as not having unknown amounts of data disappear
entirely into the bit bucket when there is a problem) or by forcing a flush in
some other way

I found this little snippet in ApplicationManager.py, but I'm not sure what to
do with it exactly, or even if this is the best place to start twiddling
around with the source:

    def manage_shutdown(self):
        """Shut down the application"""
        for db in Globals.opened: db.close()
        sys.exit(0)

    def manage_pack(self, days=0, REQUEST=None):
        """Pack the database"""

        t=time.time()-days*86400

        db=self._p_jar.db()
        t=db.pack(t)
        if REQUEST is not None:
            REQUEST['RESPONSE'].redirect(
                REQUEST['URL1']+'/manage_workspace')
        return t

If I don't resolve this issue, Zope won't be of much use to me (changing
environments isn't very likely right now), and I'll have to go back to a
static web site.

Do you think running Zope as a Windows Service via the registry would help?
(At least, it might help with the "logging out current user" aspect.  It won't
help with the system crashes.)

- Gregor  vorlon#iglou.com