network servers

[Sridhar R]

We're planning to write a server for handling atleast 1000 and atmost
4000 clients.  The connection is basically (TCP)
connect-send-disconnect type.  So no client will open up its
connection forever, except for the small time duration of sending the
message.  This is something like online programming contest, where
clients will submit their programs for evaluation and server will
return the results (after sometime). I though of writing the server
part in C and use Python for client.

Is it possible to use python for that high performance serving?  Note:
There is only one physical machine.