[Zope] Is Zope slow?

[Martijn Pieters]

On Thu, Jul 06, 2000 at 04:27:22AM -0400, Firestar wrote:
> Well, i do appreciate the 'extra' features that Zope provides, but speed is
> still a matter of concern here. Imagine showing my boss "what my website can
> do" and all those advanced features, but it crawls like a snail... 

"Slow" does not mean "crawl". It is slowER, it is a relative term. Is
www.zope.org slow? Is www.CodeCatalog.com slow? Is www.enterlinux.com slow?
For the featureset, PHP and Perl are either as fast or slower. Take Code
Catalog; they built their prototype site both in PHP and Zope, and Zope was
the fastest.

Zope is more than fast enough for 90% of the sites out there. In many cases,
you can optimize the application if necessary, you can use caching or
cache-control headers where applicable, you can use ZEO to distribute the load
over multiple Zope processes, on multiple machines if need be. You could run
static content from a dedicated machine, like Slashdot does. But this is not
always necessary. Zope.org runs without ZEO on a sub $1000 box. Commodity
hardware. 85.000 hits per day and on the increase.

Again, slow is a relative term. How can you be sure that Zope is going to be
the bottleneck in your app? It could well be that your internet connection is
the weak link, or that you just don't get the userbase to tax Zope to the
limits. Will the additional development time spent on another platforms be
worth the little bit of extra performance, if you don't even need it? 

Check out Zope.org for more examples and case studies. Search the mail
archives for comparisons. Forget about the speed issue.

-- 
Martijn Pieters
| Software Engineer            mailto:mj@digicool.com
| Digital Creations          http://www.digicool.com/
| Creators of Zope               http://www.zope.org/
| ZopeStudio: http://www.zope.org/Products/ZopeStudio
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