Sometimes, I really am an idiot. A couple of years ago I was involved in development of a front-end Zope application for a major Slovenian ISP with more than 100 000 users. No matter what we did, Zope just wasn’t fast. In fact it was so slow, it was soon abandoned for one more suitable solution.

The failure of our project was largely my fault, because I haven’t made sure Zope was a good fit for what we wanted. I learned a lot, but it also left a bitter aftertaste and a question, why are people using it?

The obvious answer is of course, because it DOES fit their needs. It’s just that they are not building a site or an application that needs to handle few hundred simultaneous requests. They handle a few at most, so Zope or Plone or what-have-you is more than speedy enough and it’s their features that count.

It really took me awhile to grasp this and it only became really clear this week, after reading a little Plone benchmark and having a discussion with Sebastjan about slowness of Slovenian sites.

On a positive note, we generate pages in less than 6 ms now and can reduce it even further, if needed.