I'm going to be soon checking in code that will:
- use select count(*) on the experiment view pages
- Have a 'Cache' tab in the ZMI, this will display which platforms are cached,
and allow the SA to cache all the platforms (would be nice to allow them to
selectively load particular platforms but I didn't do that (yet))

I don't think select count(*) would need to be cached, it seems pretty
instantaneous for me, even on the 133plus2.

ERROR reading file: msg104
Possibly a access right configuration problem.
[Errno 13] Permission denied: '/extra/trackers/sgdi/db/files/msg/0/msg104'

The only reason it is touching the cache is the total reporter count (it is
getting the # of keys in the dictionary).  This could easily be switched to a
'select count(*)', although that would just make some other point potentially slow.

And yeah, while bringing data into zope from the DB seems to be fairly
expensive, it isn't *that* expensive (ie the threshold of pain to get a long
wait is much lower than one would think but is at least an order of magnitude
higher than phenodata)

The only data that should be required to build the experiment pages is the
phenodata data frame and the experiment meta data.  

In an email conversation, Jeff suggested that the slowness is due to building a
geneid cache.  

Is that really what is going on?  If so, why?

If not, we need to at least understand why this is slow.  I would expect that
pulling this much data from the DB would not be so slow, but certainly I could
be wrong about that.