[Zope] Urgent help needed: Zope falls over under moderate load

Toby Dickenson tdickenson@geminidataloggers.com
Wed, 21 Nov 2001 11:30:08 +0000


On Tue, 20 Nov 2001 14:40:25 -0600, "Michael Fraase"
<mfraase@farces.com> wrote:

>I don't run a proxy server or anything else
>in front of Zope.

This is almost certainly your problem.

>And why does it fall over anyway? This just doesn't make any sense to
>me. I can see it getting slow and timing out, but giving up completely
>and just bailing? What's that about? Explain it to me like I'm an
>intelligent, non-technical friend. Thanks.

Zope's http implementation is *not* *robust* enough to be exposed to
the raw internet. It has a number of serious, and fairly obvious
denial-of-service vulnerabilities. Ive never seen Zope fall over
without someone trying, but I wouldnt be suprised. Making it robust
would involve a rewrite.

Today the only way to make zope robust is to use a front-end proxy to
sanitize the http conversation. If that front-end proxy also does some
caching then thats a bonus.


Toby Dickenson
tdickenson@geminidataloggers.com