[Zope] One big Zope or many small Zopes? Or perhaps a ZEO?

[Kirk Strauser]

At 2001-10-19T16:22:27Z, Chris Muldrow <muldrow@mac.com> writes:

> Also, we're running at traffic somewhere around 60,000-80,000 page views a
> day--not huge traffic, but more than we had a year ago, certainly. At what
> traffic point have most folks noticed a need for more server power?  Is it
> 100,000 page views? More? Less?
> 
> We are also serving ads to the Zopes from a different Windows 2000 server
> running Apache and using a PERL process to serve the ads at a rate of
> between 400,000 and 700,000 ads per day.

Note: I'm a Zope newbie, as anyone reading my last week's worth of postings
can tell, but I'm not completely inexperienced at network design.

I would strongly recommend the use of a proxy/cache in front of your
servers.  It sounds as if much of your content is pseudo-static.  That is,
although it may change, it's likely to do so slowly.  Caching servers can
make a vast difference in performance in setups like this.  For example,
suppose that users often go to:

  http://mynewspaper.com/sports/todays_headlines

Why force your Zope to regenerate that page 30,000 times per day when it may
only change 3 or 4 times?  Zope even has built-in methods for cache
management so that you can have it send special headers to the cache servers
to tell them how often to re-query specific objects.  You may not want to
cache a stock ticker at all.  OTOH, the current temperature won't
drastically change in any given 5 minute interval.

I haven't personally used these methods yet (see the first line of my post),
but I *can* certify that a properly-configured Squid server can increase
your current platform's potential throughput by several hundred percent.
-- 
Kirk Strauser