[Zope] performance problems

[Jerome Alet]

Hi,

during a training session this morning, I told the seven students to 
install Zope on their personnal account on a Samba server from their 
W2K workstations but to run it "locally" through the network. 

network is full-duplex 100 MBits/s, workstations are 1.8 Ghz PIVs 
with 768 Mb RAM, server is Bi-Xeon 2.4 Ghz with 1 Gb RAM, and a 
raid5 array, under Linux.

When each student started his Zope instance, I found that 
performance wasn't impressive at all, and that Samba used a lot of 
CPU ressources. It worked though, and I see no error or warning in 
Samba's log files. 

Is it "normal" ? (this was the first time I used such a configuration,
the room is brand new)

Does someone use such a configuration ? What are the performances ?

AI suspect something abnormal because I use Samba since 1996-97 and 
I don't remember having seen such a CPU ressources use. My office server
is actually a PPro 200 Mhz with 128 Mb RAM and serves 8 stations without
problems (not with Zope, though)

On the other hand this may be that the way Zope uses the ZODB, 
particularly at startup time, is really ressource intensive on the 
Samba server. 

Could anyone report similar or different experiences ?

Is there a parameter to change on the Samba server to improve
Zope's performance ?

Thanks in advance

Jerome Alet