[Chicago] Tornado, shines good on Python?

[Garrett Smith]

On Sun, Sep 13, 2009 at 12:28 AM, Martin Maney <maney at two14.net> wrote:

> On Sat, Sep 12, 2009 at 07:30:56PM -0500, Brian Ray wrote:
> > Any thoughts on this...
> >
> >     http://www.tornadoweb.org/
> >
> > From http://www.heise.de/english/newsticker/news/145214 Bret Taylor,
> > Facebook's Director of Products:
> >
> >     """Tornado also offers much higher performance than existing Python
> > web frameworks. A multiple process Tornado server on a 4 core 2.4Ghz AMD
> > Opteron system managed 8213 web requests per second, while a single
> > threaded version managed 3353. This compares with Django at 2223 requests
> > per second, Web.py at 2066 and CherryPy at 785."""
>

I just saw this. I think these guys are taking the wrong tone.

I was saddened to read Glyph's post in that he had to defend Twisted from
some (apparently) less than sensitive remarks from the Tornado team.
Unfortunate.

It's easy to get into numbers wars -- I'm afraid my posts may feed more of
this nonsense. Hopefully they wont be misconstrued to be saying that one
server is better than another. My interest in this is simply to gain a
better understanding of low level performance characteristics when running
the simplest of web apps.

As has been pointed out by others on the list, there are a *ton* of factors
that one should consider when looking a web platform. Hello world benchmarks
give you insight into only one facet of a complex system.

So, just to show how crazy stats can be, here's my results, using the same
ab test the Tornado team used:

======== ====== ======== ======= =======
Server    Run 1    Run 2   Run 3     Avg
======== ====== ======== ======= =======
Faps       6046     6335    6319    6233
Modwsgi    3326     3381    3452    3386
Tornado    2273     2257    2132    2221
CherryPy   2112     2044    2048    2068
======== ====== ======== ======= =======

Pretty different story. Who knows, it's all lies anyway, seriously. I do
think they should tone down their claims as they can easily be
misinterpreted if not hurtful to the outstanding projects they're comparing
themselves with.

In any case, having another well supported, excellent codebase like Tornado
is a big win for the Python community (and WSGI!), no matter the silly
numbers games we play.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mail.python.org/pipermail/chicago/attachments/20090915/2bc4962a/attachment.htm>