[Wylug-help] Appalling Zope/Plone performance: what have I missed?

[Jason Lander]

Dave,

Plone and Zope tread that fine line between really-clever programming and
look-at-me-I'm-really-clever programming.

As for your points...

On memory usage: plone does keep a lot of the data in memory but the
unused stuff should be paged out. The Zope/Plone instance here has 40Mb
allocated but only 9Mb resident.

On documentation...

> That's a bit of an indictment of an application which is universally
> promoted for its 'usability'.

If you install plone (from one of the friendly installers), start it up
and point and click from then on, it is usable with minimal documentation.

If you want to change anything or extend it, you meet the kind of learning
curve that requires a team of sherpas.

If you survive that bit, it is an elegant and powerful programming tool.

Our Plone project here was a staff database capable of:

* representing the byzantine relationships between the staff and
  postgraduate students of a University Department,
* allowing arbitary data to be attached to users profiles
and
* importing publication data from a separate database.

The whole thing weighs in at about 1000 lines of Python and 15 page
templates.

- Jason