[Zope-ZEO] Advice

[Jim Fulton]

Andy McKay wrote:
> 
> Hi just starting to look at Zeo which might save my butt on a few issues,
> from reading the docs it would seem it can do these things but any advice
> would be great:
> 
> - we have imports that happen and suck up resources, plus things such as
> packing need to occur. Of course this can totally halt the output from db.
> Would ZEO allow me to have two copies of ODB and have one packing, then the
> other meaning that one is always available?

Packing doesn't totally halt the output from the DB. In fact, there is
almost no interruption for packing.  Packing does consume CPU resources, 
so, for example, zope.org does tend to slow down a little when it's being packed, 
but it is still available. You can, for example, continue to update
the database while it's being packed.  ZEO lets you put the storage server
on a different machine from the Zope application, so you can separate the packing
load from the machine that is serving your app.  You can perform expensive operations
like large imports or catalog updates on a separate machine from your application, 
thus isolating the application from these tasks.

> - my manager wants me to create a staging server system, changes move from
> dev to staging to production. Of course there would only be certain objects
> that be moved through this process. I've seen cryptic comments that this is
> possible....?

If all of your development is through the web, then Zope versions
can work really well for this. This is what we (Digital Creations) 
do.  

The biggest problem with this is introduced by the catalog.
The catalog interacts rather badly with versions. We are working 
on fixing this.

Jim

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