[Zope] One big Zope or many small Zopes? Or perhaps a ZEO?

[Chris Muldrow]

We ( a newspaper site) are currently running several different Zope
  installations for different vertical products--one install for our Homes
  Listings, for instance, and another for our big news content site, and
  a couple of testing and development installs.
  The sites share many of the same elements--both look-and-feel stuff as
  well as various navigation methods, etc. Does it make sense for us to
  combine all of these sites into one installation so we can centralize
  the shared site elements, or should we keep multiple sites for
  performance's sake? We're weighing the issues of doing some sort of
  XML-RPC resource sharing or just lumping everything together under one
  domain and one Zope installation.

  Also, we're running at traffic somewhere around 60,000-80,000 page views
  a day--not huge traffic, but more than we had a year ago, certainly. At
  what traffic point have most folks noticed a need for more server power?
  Is it 100,000 page views? More? Less?

  We are also serving ads to the Zopes from a different Windows 2000 
server
  running Apache and using a PERL process to serve the ads at a rate of
  between 400,000 and 700,000 ads per day.

  We've got a pretty Zopish site--lots of method calls, lots of ZSQL
  (connected to MySQL), lots of graphics and buttons all in Zope and
  reliance on the Catalog for index building and such. We're on a single
  non-Zeo install for our "big site" right now on a Win2k box, and we're
  having some slowness issues cropping up at times. We've had some bigger
  Windows/Zope/Apache problems in the past, so we're already preparing for
  a move to Linux (plus that seems to be where most of the community and
  certainly where Zope Corp. is focusing--though I'm a big fan of MacZope,
  personally...)

  We're wondering whether we should be considering a ZEO move at this
  time, too. And now would be a good time for us to combine our "satellite
  sites" under one umbrella. Any opinions? Many probably think "just ZEO 
it"
  but we would like single box alternatives also.

  Thanks! Chris and the gang at fredericksburg.com
  cmuldrow@fredericksburg.com