[Zope] Major problems with slow catalog queries

[Lea Smith]

Hi,

I have been developing a site around Zope and the CMF
and have got to a stage of loading on the data we have
and testing the site.
(zope 2.5.1, python 2.1.3, testing on win2000)

The loaded data creates around 11,000 objects which
are all cataloged in the default portal_catalog. The
more objects that are added and cataloged the slower
searches become as well as the whole site in general.

Have used the product callprofiler and found 90% of
the page creation time is more often than not taken up
by the script which queries the catalog and returns
the catalog results. The script does nothing else.
This time generally varies between 8 to 30 seconds,
but sometimes as long as 5 minutes! 

I can't work out what is going on with the catalog, or
what is a normal query time for a catalog loaded with
this amount of info. And the slow response is going to
get worse as visitors add more content. Not good!

Have tried recreating the catalog just incase
something had gone wrong there. Played around with
caching using RAMCache Manager as well as the
control_panel cache settings with no reliable
improvement. (Need to read up on the cache usage as
wasn't quite sure of how best to set it up).

Any ideas on normal response times for the catalog and
anything I can look at or try would be fantastic. 

Thanks for any help.


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