High speed web services

[herbasher]

Hello!

I'm wondering: I'm really not so much into heavy frameworks like
Django, because I need to build a fast, simple python based
webservice.

That is, a request comes in at a certain URL, and I want to utilize
Python to respond to that request.

Ideally, I want the script to be "cached" so it doesn't have to be re-
parsed everytime.


Phrasing this into a question:
How do I built highly available and lighting fast Python webservice?

I'm open to using any kind of server software, and all that under a
*nix based system.



thanks,
Herb