Poor python and/or Zope performance on Sparc

[joa2212]

Hello everybody,

I'm posting this message because I'm quiet frustrated.

We just bought a software from a small software vendor. In the
beginning he hosted our application on a small server at his office. I
think it was a Fujitsu-Siemens x86 running debian Linux. The
performance of the DSL-Line was very poor, so we decided to buy an own
machine to host the application ourselves.

The application is based on the Zope Application server (2.8.8-final
w/ python 2.3.6) along with many other packages like ghostview,
postgres, freetype, python imaging lib, etc... I once saw the
application running at the office of my software vendor and it was
running very well.

So I thought that - when the bottleneck of poor DSL performance has
disappeared - the software will run as fast as at his office. But I
erred. The performance is more than poor.

We have a Sun T1000 with 8 cores and 8 GB of RAM. First, I installed
Solaris 10 because I know this OS better than Debian Linux. Result:
poor Performance. After that I decided to migrate to debian:

root at carmanager > uname -a
Linux carmanager 2.6.18-5-sparc64-smp #1 SMP Wed Oct 3 04:16:38 UTC
2007 sparc64 GNU/Linux

Result: Almost even worse. The application is not scaling at all.
Every time you start a request it is hanging around on one cpu and is
devouring it at about 90-100% load. The other 31 CPUs which are shown
in "mpstat" are bored at 0% load.

If anybody needs further information about installed packages, I'll
post it here.

Any hints are appreciated!
Thanks, Joe.

PS: Fortunately the Sun is not bought yet. It's a "try&buy" from my
local dealer. So if there are any hints like "buy a new machine
because Sun is crap" I will _not_ refuse obediance.