[Zope] High CPU usage on ExtFile objects?

[Ben Chapman]

Hello:

We're running our law school web-site on Zope 2.4.3 (source release, 
python 2.1, linux2). Zope is running through Apache pcgi.

Our Data.fs is about 130MB in size. In addition we have two large 
directories of external image/external file objects. Occasionally, we 
see CPU usage shoot to 99.9% when attempting to view large (up to 8MB in 
size) PDFs stored as ExtFile objects in these folders. The attempted 
display of the PDF then fails. The folders with the PDFs are on a local 
10K RPM SCSI drive. We're using a linux 2.4.x SMP kernel with 2 PIII 
500Mhz processors and 1 GB RAM. Load average when not attempting to 
display the large PDFs is something like: 0.79 - 0.64.

Does anyone have any suggestions on how to improve performance for 
display of these PDF documents?

Regards,

Ben

-- 
Benjamin J. Chapman   benjamin-chapman@utulsa.edu   918/631-2405
Director of Computing Resources  TU College of Law
http://www.utulsa.edu/law/support/
Send computing support requests to: support@mail.law.utulsa.edu