[Zope] Is Zope slow?

[Phill Hugo]

Firestar wrote:

> I have been programming with PHP and PERL, and they are quite fast, even when serving dynamic pages. Of course, they do not provide all the features of Zope, but they are able to handle things like sessions, authentication, database API...which is quite adequate for most small-to-medium websites. (although sometimes it's quite frustrating putting the modules together:)

Yes, Zope is slower than Apache but so is a bus compared to a porsche.
However, you can do things with buses that would take forever with a
sports car, and some that are impossible (moving furniture ;)

If you want the best of both worlds, map out the images and large static
files from apache's config to go to itself and forward the rest over
PCGI to Zope (read up on mod_rewrite). This way, the dynamic stuff is
served by zope and the static stuff is handled by apache, both doing
what they are good at. You can add LocalFS to Zope to allow
administration of the static files too. This is what PHP does, that is
just a module which handles php files, everything else is handled by
Apache. PHP itself isn't that fast (it doesn't even cache compiled
code).

A decent 500Mhz PIII will knock out about 80 pages per second under Zope
(~40 for complex things) but given that many sites where speed is
important are very graphical, the ratio of a zope hit to an apache one
is reasonable  - on the site I'm working on this is about 1:10 and
current traffic (not yet under Zope) is 18Million hits per month. 

If ever you run out of power (or reach the halfway point) you can start
thinking of adding some caching or migrate to ZEO. In fact, if that
happens, you'd be stupid not to have some sort of cluster - you'd have a
very busy site!

Phill