[Tutor] Zope/Python web devel

[Jay Loden]

I've been considering some web projects recently, but I have some concerns 
about selecting the tools I plan to use. I like Python, and I was immediately 
thinking of using Zope to build on.

However, I am concerned about performance, resource usage, and scalability. 
Does anyone here have any experience with Zope or any other application 
frameworks like CherryPy used in a large/enterprise environment? Is Zope 
overly memory hungry or slow? If performance is a key point, am I better off 
growing my own solution from the ground up?

Second, and more specific to Python itself - does anyone here have first hand 
knowledge of how Python compares with other solutions for server side web 
development? I'm specifically interested in comparisons to PHP, but Ruby, 
Perl, Java, C/C++ and Lisp, etc. observations would be welcome. Basically, 
I'm trying to get a feel for what kind of performance and resource usage I'd 
see out of Python versus other options. I realize this is heavily dependent 
on what exactly I end up doing, but just as a general observation, I'd like 
to know what others have experienced. I know that some large web applications 
are built on Python (Yahoo Mail, Google), but there's certainly less being 
done in Python on the web than in Perl or PHP. I just want to make sure this 
isn't because of Python disadvantages as opposed to simple market share.

All responses are welcome. If anyone has links to some benchmarking studies 
comparing the two for web development I'd be grateful for those as well.

-Jay