[Zope] Urgent help needed: Zope falls over under moderate load

Chris McDonough chrism@zope.com
Tue, 20 Nov 2001 13:10:48 -0500


Your clients maybe *should* laugh at you if you're not doing any
caching.  ;-)

To cache, you have two options.

Use Zope's RAM Cache Manager to do caching.  As a result, the pages
you choose to cache will be cached in RAM and won't be regenerated on
each request.

- OR -

Use a caching web server in front of Zope to bear the brunt of the
load in conjunction with (perhaps) the HTTP Accelerated Cache Manager
stuff in Zope.  In this case, your web server (or proxy) keeps a copy
of a pregenerated page and serves it out to requestors instead of
continually asking Zope to regenerate it.

One of these is going to be necessary for any sort of high-traffic
site.  Zope can't keep up when it needs to dynamically generate
content; you need to help it out by doing some kind of caching.

If you don't or can't use Cache Managers, but you still want to use an
HTTP caching proxy in front of your Zope site, you'll need to make
each of the pages you want to cache has an "Expires" and "Last
Modified" header.  You may do this by using RESPONSE.setHeader if
you're not using a cache manager.  If you're behind Apache, you can
use mod_proxy with caching turned on.

See http://www.zope.org/SiteIndex/search?text_content=caching for more
information.

I've also found the document about mod_perl and headers at
http://perl.apache.org/guide/correct_headers.html helpful... there are
lots of other nuggets in that document as well.

HTH,

- C



----- Original Message -----
From: "Michael Fraase" <mfraase@farces.com>
To: <zope@zope.org>
Sent: Tuesday, November 20, 2001 12:39 PM
Subject: [Zope] Urgent help needed: Zope falls over under moderate
load


> So yesterday my site got slashdotted. Zope fell over within minutes.
A
> day later it's still falling over within an hour or so.
>
> I have 512Kb DSL (the outbound channel is 512Kb; the inbound channel
is
> 768Kb). I figured that bandwidth would be saturated or that Windows
2000
> Pro would melt long before Zope would fail, but that has proven not
to
> be the case.
>
> Here's the particulars of my installation:
>
> Pentium III 850MHz with 768Mb RAM
> MS Windows 2000 Pro with current patches and service packs
> Zope 2.4.3 running as a service
> Squishdot 1.3.0
> 512Kb bandwidth
>
> Here's the registry start parameters:
>
> "C:\PROGRA~1\FARCES~1\bin\python.exe"
"C:\PROGRA~1\FARCES~1\z2.py" -S
> -w80 -W9800
>
> I don't know what the -S is; -w80 sets the port Zope's web server
> listens on; and -W9800 sets the WebDAV port.
>
> Zope just shuts down and closes port 80 on what seems to be very
> moderate load. We're talking a peak of less than 60,000 hits, a peak
of
> 125Mb bandwidth usage, just over 58,000 page views, and a peak of
4013
> visitors.
>
> What I've been doing is to manually stop the Zope service and
restart
> it, but that's ridiculous. At this rate, clients are going to laugh
at
> me when I suggest using Zope for a web project.
>
> Anyone have any ideas? I'm digestified, so please cc me in any
response.
>
> Thanks kindly.
>
> --
> Michael Fraase
> ARTS & FARCES LLC
> mfraase@farces.com
> www.farces.com
> PGP Fingerprint:
> 3D85 F3F4 9E65 4949 176A  260C CB47 190D C864 9A96
>
>
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