[Zope] Zope and Dual-CPU machines.

chas panda@skinnyhippo.com
Fri, 24 Dec 1999 17:33:20 +0800


Does Zope run better on dual-processor machines ? 
(using FreeBSD or Linux).  

I know that this might seem like a silly question but 
some applications, like MySQL, sometimes see worse 
performance on dual-CPU boxes than similar single-CPU 
boxes.

It may be a moot point if the limiting factor is 
going to be bandwidth/network (on a PIII, 512 MB RAM 
box) but it'd would be nice to know if dual-CPU
machines are worth it; Sorry, I realise that this just
screams "it depends"  since disk I/O and load vary 
from machine to machine, and application to application.

Personally I'm more of a "stick lots of smaller frontline 
webservers in front of a monster DB" guy, but bandwidth 
costs are proportional to the number of servers I colocate 
at my access provider.

Thanks in advance for any advice from 

chas

ps. Just as a slightly off-topic question, this has made
    me wonder : If you have a dual processor machine, what 
    needs to be changed in an application to make it "dual 
    processor compatible ?" Or should the OS take care of
    all of that and do the load-balancing between the CPU's ?
    I guess that I won't have to change my Zope application
    at all ... just leave Zope to work it out. But I'm also
    creating some Python scripts to handle RPC services... 
    or will the underlying Python interpreter handle all of
    that without me having to know ?