[Zope] 450 hits/s with 40+ TPS ..:D : Thanks to the Community

[Matt Hamilton]

Ben Last (Zope) wrote:

> Using Zope to build a consumer-focused website (to support a mobile phone
> product) that may need to scale to vast numbers of hits.  Hence a lot of
> focus on caching - it's dynamic in the sense that the pages are generated by
> templates, but they change sufficiently seldom that both levels of Zope
> cache can be used (as appropriate, as Jamie H. points out) to serve very

Another general point to make about caching, and RAMCacheManager:  you 
can cache *method calls* rather than entire http page requests.  Whilst 
most people just use a RAMCacheManager to cache an entire page ZPT, you 
can cache individual sub-templates.  This can be very useful to pages in 
which the majority of the page is static, an just a small part changes. 
  We used this technique for an e-Commerce site in which the mail body 
of the page was a list of products, which was quite expensive to 
generate.  We cache that central area (as a separate ZPT), but we don't 
cache the containing ZPT which contains things like the shopping basket 
details, etc.

> We're also working on a PlayStation game that has a vast database behind it;
> that's all Python/MySQL driven, but it uses ZODB for intermediate result
> caching of some very compute-intensive stuff that can take a couple of days
> to run.

Cool :)  It is always interesting to see systems that don't have the 
traditional web browser as the client.  We did some work using Zope as a 
backend to a flash-based training app that made calls via XML-RPC to the 
backend.

> Which brings me to a question - I'm at the point of sorting out Zope
> hosting.  Anyone got recommendations for a good hosting company,
> Linux-based, Zope-literate, that'll scale from a single dedicated server to
> a load-balanced cluster (as required)?  UK preferred, EU second choice, US
> if we have to (I don't have anything against the US, it's the time
> difference that can be an issue).

We are UK based (Bristol) and offer hosting.  We don't offer shared Zope 
hosting, as we believe you really need filesystem access to make the 
most of Zope.  We do offer a competitive colocation service, and have 
experience in scaling Zope and setting up ZEO clusters.  Email me 
off-list if you want more details.

-Matt


-- 
Matt Hamilton                                       matth at netsight.co.uk
Netsight Internet Solutions, Ltd.        Business Vision on the Internet
http://www.netsight.co.uk                             +44 (0)117 9090901
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