web guru advise needed.

[Raaijmakers, Vincent (IndSys,]

Looking at all the materials available, books, technologies etc etc..
I try to make a decision on what technology to select for a web server design, but I need help.

I know, this question has been asked many many times sorry about that, but please help me.
My desk is full with printouts and books, I'm getting a stack overflow.

Currently the existing design is using JSP's. 
Now, most of the business logic of behind this application is database and image processing driven. This part of the code is in a design phase, not coding. Looking at the design, python would be very powerful. I'm afraid that java will kill the performance + development time here.
But how to make the link between my JSP and python business logic. Jython is still at the python 2.1 level.
Looking at the libraries, the use of Python 2.3 seems for me more a must.

The web server requirements I'm looking at are:

1) simple presentation layer processing. The HTML pages produced by server will be more focused on presenting images (dynamic), rather that fancy tables, frames, buttons.
2) the framework has to be robust and FAST on performance.
3) runs only on Linux, well not really a requirement, more a statement.
4) runs on Apache (and/or Tomcat)

What technology gives me the best performance?
I'm so afraid that adapters like WebKit kills my performance but because of my jsp experience, psp seems the best option.

Vincent