[Zope] Zope 2.5.2 vrs 2.7b2 for speed

[BZ]

So I have been reading about how Python 2.3 is about 25% faster than 
older pythons and I thought I would try it out on some Zope goodness.

I compiled Zope27b2 with Python2.3 and started doing some benchmarks. I 
tweaked a bunch of settings like what servers to start up, debug mode, 
interval check times but with all of that I could get Zope to max at 
about 60 requests per second using Apache Bench with 25 concurrency and 
500 requests.

I went back to my handy dandy Zope 2.5.2 installation and tweaking it I 
could get it to serve up at about an 85-90 RPS.

For these tests I had nothing else running, I ran them more than a few 
times (for caching to catch up) and shutdown and restarted the servers 
to make sure there was nothing bad in one run.

So is this a Zope27b2 thing? Is it a Python2.3 thing? Am I just testing 
too many different scenarios so it is not a good test?

All of this on my MacOSX 1GHz G4, 2 GB of ram and a 120GB 7200 RPM WD 
SE drive with 8MB of cache.

Here is a typical result with 2.7b2:
bash-2.05a$ ab -c 25 -n 500 http://10.0.1.2:8080/index_html
This is ApacheBench, Version 1.3d <$Revision: 1.1.1.9 $> apache-1.3

Benchmarking 10.0.1.2 (be patient)
Server Software:        Zope/(Zope
Server Hostname:        10.0.1.2
Server Port:            8080

Document Path:          /index_html
Document Length:        3014 bytes

Concurrency Level:      25
Time taken for tests:   8.529 seconds
Complete requests:      500
Failed requests:        0
Broken pipe errors:     0
Total transferred:      1604000 bytes
HTML transferred:       1507000 bytes
Requests per second:    58.62 [#/sec] (mean)
Time per request:       426.45 [ms] (mean)
Time per request:       17.06 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent 
requests)
Transfer rate:          188.06 [Kbytes/sec] received

Connnection Times (ms)
               min  mean[+/-sd] median   max
Connect:        0     0    0.0      0     2
Processing:   176   415   70.8    407   733
Waiting:      176   415   70.8    407   733
Total:        176   415   70.7    407   733

And this with Zope 2.5.2
bash-2.05a$ ab -c 25 -n 500 http://10.0.1.2:8080/index_html
This is ApacheBench, Version 1.3d <$Revision: 1.1.1.9 $> apache-1.3

Server Software:        Zope/(Zope
Server Hostname:        10.0.1.2
Server Port:            8080

Document Path:          /index_html
Document Length:        3164 bytes

Concurrency Level:      25
Time taken for tests:   5.085 seconds
Complete requests:      500
Failed requests:        0
Broken pipe errors:     0
Total transferred:      1700895 bytes
HTML transferred:       1585164 bytes
Requests per second:    98.33 [#/sec] (mean)
Time per request:       254.25 [ms] (mean)
Time per request:       10.17 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent 
requests)
Transfer rate:          334.49 [Kbytes/sec] received

Connnection Times (ms)
               min  mean[+/-sd] median   max
Connect:        0     0    0.1      0     2
Processing:   152   247   34.8    240   586
Waiting:      150   246   34.9    239   586
Total:        152   247   34.8    240   586