[Zope] Large Portal requirements (was: Other web servers?)

Jimmie Houchin jhouchin@texoma.net
Mon, 14 Jun 1999 21:44:37 -0500


At 3:15 PM -0400 6/14/99, Michel Pelletier wrote:
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: Jimmie Houchin [mailto:jhouchin@texoma.net]
>> Sent: Monday, June 14, 1999 2:41 PM
>> To: zope@zope.org
>> Subject: [Zope] Large Portal requirements (was: Other web servers?)
>>
>> Howabout for database intensive situations like one
>> encounters in some of
>> the larger sites like Altavista, Goto, Yahoo, Amazon, etc.
>>
>> Here are very, very large databases, probably very large indexes,
>> multi-millions of objects, multi-multi-gigabytes to search, index.
>> My concern is because Python does not scale with multiple processor
>> machines, this limits ones ability to throw hardware at the
>> situation since
>> you are limited to the fastest single processor.
>>
>
>In the future, we will be have the client server model of ZODB3 (which
>will be a commercial product) that lets you have multiple Zope frontend
>processes (possibly on different machines) accessing multiple database
>backend processes (possibly on different machines).  Also, ZServer is
>currently multi-threaded, but there is no theoretical limitation to
>making it multi-process, in which each Zope instance will have it's own
>Python and thus it's own global Python lock, thus giving the OS the
>ability to schedule multiple processes among multiple processors, a
>little heavier than threads on multi-processor, but *vastly* easier to
>impliment and far more stable.

This sounds great!

My main concern was the potential inability to throw hardware at the
situation to improve performance if necessary. My preference is not with
multiple processors but with multiple machines, servers. I would much
rather provide redundancy, backups and failover via a multiple server farm.

Just needed to know if my site gets busy enough to warrant adding more
hardware I can. And throwing money at y'all can move things along. :)

I am happy now. :)

Sinking low in shame. :(
My heart was breaking at the thought of needing Java and servlets.
Like you Java is not my favorite.

[snip]
>If you had a Zope index with one million entries in it, you
>would, worst case, have to go through 20 comparison operations to find
>the element your looking for (Zope indexing uses a very efficient binary
>tree structure to store it's indexes).

Sounds Great!

>> Now I understand that different development models yield
>> different results and I don't know how Barnes and Noble's
>> website is built. I do know that B&N has a very large database
>> with multi-millions of objects with many, many gigs of data.
>>
>> Would Zope be appropriate?
>
>Sure, I can see Zope easily scaling to this level.

Great!

>> I know that my website will have similar and greater requirements
>> concerning database size and searching. Hopefully hits/traffics also will
>> be high.
>>
>> Zope and Python are my first choice.
>
>Cool!  You won't be disapointed.
>
>-Michel

This makes my day.

What a day, great news here on the Zope front and then I receive my
LinuxPPC R5 CD. This brings LinuxPPC up to Redhat 6 source level. Finally
glibc 2.x. :)

Jimmie Houchin