Loadtesting this site and compare with static Apache

Disclaimer: These tests are not very scientific so values as they stand are irrelevant.

What is interesting is the difference between the two tests.

Basically what I did was that I sucked the whole www.peterbe.com site (22 files, 111KB) down and served it via Apache on the same machine as the Zope server.

Then I did a benchmark test using using ab with 10 users at 10 concurrent requests. The result is that Apache served the files about 30% faster than Zope.

Complete results

BUT! Bare in mind that the files that Apache served up are static whereas the files Zope served up are dynamic. The content of the Zope request depends on extracting data from a database, sorting, filtering and other various conditional statements. Apache can do none of that unless you use some sort of scripting like PHP, mod_python or mod_perl.

Pages served from Zope are also checked through a comprehensive security mechanism that Apache did not in this case. Every single item (22 of them), when extracted, were with security precautions on the Zope test.

The conclusion from this is: Zope is surprisingly fast considering all the work it needs to do compared to static Apache.