Today, the Zope instance hosting this site experienced frequent crashes (as in "every couple of minutes) in the form of coredumps of the zope process. Stumped, bewildered, frustrated and near tears I did what I always do in such cases: pour my little heart out on #plone ;-)

Sure enough, help was at hand. And today's tip of the hat goes to... drumroll... lurker, who alerted me to the fact, that python needs explicit 'huge stack' suppport on FreeBSD. A bit of googling supported this view and so I reinstalled python from the ports, but first ran make config and then enabled HUGE_STACK_SIZE:

After that I ran a few stresstests with ab and the instance easily withheld several thousand requests for the front page. Why this option isn't enabled by default is beyond me. So keep that in mind, kids, when you install python on your BSD boxen: size does matter ;-) (As if the term 'huge stack size' wasn't already obscene enough without such a foot-in-mouth reference...)