[Zope] Performance requirements and ZEO

[bart hubbard]

I'm working on a project to build a public website using Zope, and am in a
position where I need to spec and order the hardware before beginning the
work on the site.  We're going to plan for 500,000 hits/day as a benchmark.
I'm leaning towards a ZEO configuration, with a dedicated ZEO Storage Server
and 2 ZEO Client machines, with a load-balancer up front.  This way, the
worst case is the performance isn't up to par, and I can just toss another
machine at it as a ZEO Client.

Here's the question: is there any benefit to having dual-processor machines
on any of these?  I think we can afford 3 of them, if necessary, but is it
even needed?  I was planning on going with Dual-Xeon 2.8 GHz boxes running
Linux.  I'd rather not run more than one instance of Zope on the clients,
btw.

Also, I'm having trouble finding info on getting SSL working in a ZEO setup.
Are there any docs out there I should read?

much thanks,
bart