Python Web Programming - looking for examples of solid high-traffic sites

[John Nagle]

Victor Kryukov wrote:
> Hello list,
> 
> our team is going to rewrite our existing web-site, which has a lot of
> dynamic content and was quickly prototyped some time ago.
...
> Our main requirement for tools we're going to use is rock-solid
> stability. As one of our team-members puts it, "We want to use tools
> that are stable, has many developer-years and thousands of user-years
> behind them, and that we shouldn't worry about their _versions_." The
> main reason for that is that we want to debug our own bugs, but not
> the bugs in our tools.

    You may not be happy with Python, then.

    Having spent the last several months implementing a reasonably complex
web site in Python, I now have an understanding of the problems involved.
Which are non-trivial.

    Some key web site components, like the SSL interface and the
MySQL interface, are written in C and maintained by third parties,
often by a single person.  Getting the correct version for your
platform and making it work can be difficult.  Getting the right
versions of MySQL, OpenSSL, and Python to all play together is
non-trivial.  Expect to have to build from source, debug the build
process, look at source repositories, submit bug reports, fix
library bugs yourself, and maintain a local set of library patches.

    Few hosting companies will have these modules available for you.
It's not like Perl or PHP, where it works out of the box.  WebFaction
claims to support Python well, but few other hosting companies bother.
Most Linux distributions ship with older versions of Python, and
that's what most hosting companies will give you.  Python 2.4
is par for the course.

    High traffic sites are a problem.  There are a number of
"frameworks", all supported by different people and with different
capabilities.  See

    http://www.polimetrix.com/pycon/slides/

for a discussion.   I haven't tried most of them, so I won't
say anything about that issue.		

> Our problem is - we yet have to find any example of high-traffic,
> scalable web-site written entirely in Python. We know that YouTube is
> a suspect, but we don't know what specific python web solution was
> used there.

     Not that much of YouTube is really in Python.  The video
codecs aren't; they'd take forever if they were.  And since Google
took over, the old YouTube search engine (which was terrible) was
replaced by Google's search technology.


					John Nagle