ZopeQuickAndNimbleness

I have done minor testing w/ Radview software and found ZOPE to be very acceptable for performance. Alot of people wrongly push the speed of applications onto the Application Server when it usually is the design of the application. ZOPE is much more straight forward design than quite a few Application Server, along with community you can validate design decision early on in the process.

ZOPE's speed is always being improved. Zope 2.2 showed a increase of 20% on single processor machines and 80% increase in performance on multi-processor machines!

There are quite a few design approaches to high volume sites that have been discussed on the mailing lists. One idea: ZOPE is great for dynamic data, so try to keep static data on another box or serve it out of another process (i.e. graphics are usually served outside of ZOPE on something more optimized to serve static data, i.e. Apache or SQUID Proxy).

Although the python interpreter has been deemed slow by other programming communities, such as PERL - I have seen Python embedded in quit a few speed sensitive systems. [And impartial comparisons, such as the Scripting Language Shootout, suggest that Perl and Python code executes at about the same speed. - pupq] I believe the trade-off of for OO approach and high dynamism for speed is a no brainer. Speed is not usually the issue - its almost ALWAYS upfront design that limits scalability of systems.

Zope 2.4 appears to be running ~10% faster than Zope 2.3.2. Zope2.4 uses Python 2.1 and some of the through-the-web-security machinery has been tweaked. There are also Cache Managers available to help work in conjunction with cache-servers and a RAM manager as well.