[Zope] Server specs.

[Jason Jones]

On Wednesday, August 18, Martijn Faassen wrote:

> > Based on the information you do give out:
> >
> > Python is a real CPU sponge, and for this kind of load I'd definitely
> > bump the horsepower up to a dual Pentium III Xeon 500MHz, 512KB L2
> > cache. Around $1100 per CPU. That said, however, I don't know how well
> > Linux scales to two CPUs; for web serving, recent benchmarks have
> > pointed out that it doesn't scale well at all.
>
> Cough, cough. Are you referring to the Mindcraft benchmarks? They didn't
> cover *dynamic* websites at all, I think, and definitely they didn't
> benchmark Zope. Also for static pages, Linux scales well enough to drown
> most network connections anyway.
>
> Anyway, I don't know how Zope would scale on two CPUs, which would be
> the real issue, I think. Does threaded Python scale to two CPUs at all?
> How do you figure out anything at all based on the information he gives
> out? Unless there's a very heavy database load, which could go on one
> CPU. I imagine that's another possibility.

Very interesting questions. It would be great to know if anyone has some
data on how python and Zope react under different load/operation conditions.
I haven't seen anyone dispute the claim that "python is a real CPU sponge",
and it looks like no one is really sure how scalable Zope is either.

From these posts, it sounds as if Zope may not be cut out for use in larger
sites at all, unless you have some serious hardware backing it up.

Does anyone have some reasonable Zope load benchmarks? I know benchmarks are
always questionable (just look at the Mindcraft debate that has sprung up
here), but at least it's a start. Does Digital Creations have any hard data?
The only statistic I've seen so far is that Zope can support up to 2 million
hits/day - and who knows what this really means.

I've also seen some hints on the list about ZEO, complete with load
balancing over multiple machines and other enterprise goodies, does anyone
know more about this or should I just wait for the announcement? I suppose I
can wait...

Jason