Zope Hosting and Performance, ZEO

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Short part:

Use ZEO. ZEO rocks. Really. In essence it’s just the ZODB with a small communication layer on top. This layer is used in Zope instances instead of using the ZODB directly. That way you can run several process groups on your machine, all connecting to the same database. This helps with the above mentioned process restarting: when one is down, the other does the work. Use mod_backhand in Apache to distribute the load between the process groups or use other load balancing tools. ZEO makes regular database packs easier, too: they run on the server and not in the Zope instances - they actually don’t notice much of the running pack. If you have, use a SMP machine. Or buy one. Really - that helps. You need to run ZEO and multiple Zope instances, though - otherwise the global interpreter lock of Python will hit you over the head and Zope will just use one of the two processors. That’s one reason why you want multiple process groups in the first place - distribution of load on the machine itself, making use of multiple processors.