[Zope] odd zope behavior -- variable size limits?

[Keith J. Farmer]

I've got a calculation engine written in C, extending python.

I've noticed that nearly every time I try to run a calculation using it,
via http://www.thuban.org/astro, apache complains that it can't reach
the zope host (error 502).  This happens with the Get Poly function in
particular, though the Get Coords function also suffers.

Given time, a refresh will pull up the results.   I suspect the pages
are eventually cached, and it is that cache which I access.

I'm trying to figure out how best to solve this dilemma.  The process
for Get Poly works like this, using external methods which act as stubs
to the C extension:

*call dataset cruncher
 (internal to the cruncher, get big uber dataset [~100k, more or less],
perform calculations that run about 10secs or less, and then pass back
roughly 20 numbers as a result)

*call result verifier
 (repeat the above, comparing the original dataset against the results
from the last step, which are a least-squares polynomial fit, and return
the rms and maximum errors)

.. then display the results.

I notice that there's a lot of disk activity when this process starts
up.  I'm wondering if it's always reloading the dll file, or if apache's
too impatient, or what.

The platform is a Win2k Server, with roughly 200M+ free at any given
moment.  The database is an MSDE/SQL Server database being accessed
through ODBC.

----------
Keith J. Farmer
kfarmer@thuban.org
http://www.thuban.org