Simon Willison’s Weblog

Tornado Web Server (via) An extremely exciting addition to the Python web landscape, Tornado is the open sourced version of FriendFeed’s custom web stack. It’s a non-blocking (epoll) Python web server designed for handling thousands of simultaneous connections, perfect for building Comet applications. The web framework is cosmetically similar to web.py or App Engine’s webapp but has decorators for writing asynchronous request handlers. The template language uses Django-style syntax but allows you to use full Python expressions. FriendFeed have benchmarked it handling 8,000 requests a second running as four load-balanced processes on a 4 core server.

# 10th September 2009, 9:32 pm / friendfeed, tornado, python, comet, webpy, webapp, appengine, django, epoll, bret-taylor

Paul Buchheit: Make your site faster and cheaper to operate in one easy step. Paul promotes gzip encoding using nginx as a proxy, and mentions that FriendFeed use a “custom, epoll-based python server” as their application server. Does that mean that they’re serving their real-time comet feeds directly from Python?

# 17th April 2009, 5:19 pm / paul-buchheit, python, friendfeed, nginx, comet, epoll, gzip