[Chicago] Facebook open sources FriendFeed's real-time Python web framework, Tornado

[Martin Maney]

On Mon, Sep 14, 2009 at 08:11:50PM -0500, Garrett Smith wrote:
> I'm maintaining an informal list of benchmark results of a simple "Hello
> World" style app for various web servers. I just updated the list to include
> Tornado.
> 
> These benchmarks are part of a web framework I'm working on in Erlang called

Nice work, although a trivial "Hello World" type of request seems
likely to measure the wrong thing for a web framework, at least as I
think of that sort of thing.  It does do a fair job of measuring the
degenerate case of a bunch of components, but says nothing at all about
how it would scale when there were thousands of differnt URLs being
requested (hence presumably exercising internal dispatching) and
something other than static content being returned (because you should
alwys be able to beat a more general framework for static content using
nginx or the like).

I know, that's very much more trouble, which is why it's rarely done. 
But these "Hello World" tests of frameworks designed for dynamic web
sites do put one to mind of the joke about the drunk who was looking
for his keys under the streetlight rather than "over there in the dark"
where he dropped them because it was so much easier to see under the
streetlight.  :-/

-- 
Trouble rather the tiger in his lair than the sage among his books.
For to you kingdoms and their armies are things mighty and enduring,
but to him they are but toys of the moment,
to be overturned with the flick of a finger. --  Gordon Dickson