High performance Python web-app

[Ian Bicking]

On Sun, 2002-05-12 at 11:51, iwk wrote:
> Hi there,
> 
> We've been using a custom developed html/python templating system which 
> runs under CGI. It was ported to mod_python one year and a half ago, but 
>    as the system was only used for small-scale sites, in the end that 
> was never taken into production. Now however, a customer wants to deploy 
> the system on Apache 2 running on Win32 and the site is expected to 
> attract a rather large number of visistors on occasion. Considering the 
> abysmal performance of CGI apps on Windows, this poses a considerable 
> problem.
> 
> My question is: are there any *stable* solutions available to enable 
> fast ptyhon web-apps running on Apache 2/Win32? (Mod_python only runs on 
> Apache 1.3 as far as I know and Mod_snake seems to have been taken off 
> line....)

Webware (webware.sf.net) might require more refactoring than
mod_python/mod_snake (if you're coming from CGI), but it's zippy
enough.  Unfortunately, the fastest way to connect to Apache (mod_webkit
-- a custom module just for Webware) hasn't been adapted for Apache 2.0
yet.  I can't imagine it would be hard to port, though, as it's only 700
lines of simple code.  The C-based CGI adapter is also surprisingly fast
on Linux, but I imagine it would be slow on Windows (because of the
penalty for starting new processes).  The Webware AppServer itself is
thread-based, and it runs fine in Windows.

  Ian