[Zope] How small a box can zope run on?

[Tony McDonald]

At 10:15 am +0100 26/10/00, Toby Dickenson wrote:
>On Wed, 25 Oct 2000 18:43:57 +0200, "Alexander Limi"
><alexander@limi.net> wrote:
>
>>We are building some device controller software and to control those we have
>>a normal 486 with 24MB RAM running linux. Has anybody tried running zope on
>>such a modest setup? There is only going to be one or two users connected to
>>Zope at once, so we don't need much performance in terms of page views per
>>second :)
>
>Yes, Im using Zope in a similar scenario and it works well.
>
>I found a benefit in using a smaller number of publisher threads (I
>use -T 2 ). Each thread gets its own copy of the ODB, which is an
>unnecessary memory hog for the expected load.

????!!!

This is the first I've ever seen written on this subject. If it's 
correct (and I have no reason to disbelieve Toby - I've tried a few 
things on our box here and it seems to pan out), then this explains 
large memory consumption on our servers (roughly 80 - 180 Mbyte RAM 
used per server).

I shall be doing a sweep of our Zope servers and packing the 
databases (the ODBs that is).

One thing though, is there a 'party line' on what number the -T 
parameter should be set to? Coming from an Apache background, I'm 
used to having dozens of httpd processes hanging around waiting for 
something to happen. I've always assumed that threads did much the 
same thing.

Perhaps I'm wrong....

thoughts?
Tone
------
Dr Tony McDonald,  FMCC, Networked Learning Environments Project 
http://nle.ncl.ac.uk/
The Medical School, Newcastle University Tel: +44 191 222 5116
A Zope list for UK HE/FE  http://www.fmcc.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/zope