fairly large webapp: from Java to Python. experiences?

[john_sips_tea at yahoo.com]

I've got a fairly substantial webapp written in Java (plus Tomcat,
Hibernate, Struts, JSP, MySQL) that is a bit of a bear to work with. I
didn't write it. Much of it is only very sparsely documented (if at
all). No design docs anywhere. It's a large webapp with many classes
and fairly deep inheritance hierarchies. There seems to be JUnit test
cases in place.

The possibility of re-writing it has come up, and I must say that,
although it would likely be a ton of work, it could also be a real
pythonic adventure. ;) Reasons for a rewrite are to get better
flexibility, easier maintenance (easier to make changes), and the
possibility of really slimming down the size of the thing. And of
course, it would be nice to work with Python -- possibly significantly
more productive.

Does anyone here have any experience with large(ish) webapps in Python?
I was sniffing around the following A-team of toolkits: CherryPy,
Cheetah, SQLObject, all behind Apache2. Has anyone seen performance
issues with Python webapps?

Could one reasonably expect to have an easier time with maintainence
and future modifications with using Python over Java?

Any tips, stories, recommendations, and/or experiences are most
welcome.

Thanks.