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

[Michele Simionato]

On May 16, 11:04 pm, Victor Kryukov <victor.kryu... at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> 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.
>
> 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.
>
> TurboGears, Django and Pylons are all nice, and provides rich features
> - probably too many for us - but, as far as we understand, they don't
> satisfy the stability requirement - Pylons and Django hasn't even
> reached 1.0 version yet. And their provide too thick layer - we want
> something 'closer to metal', probably similar to web.py -
> unfortunately, web.py doesn't satisfy the stability requirement
> either, or so it seems.
>
> So the question is: what is a solid way to serve dynamic web pages in
> python? Our initial though was something like python + mod_python +
> Apache, but we're told that mod_python is 'scary and doesn't work very
> well'.

AFAIK mod_python is solid and works well, but YMMV of course.
If you want rock solid stability, you want a framework where there is
little
development going on. In that case,  I have a perfect match for your
requirements: Quixote. It has been around for ages, it is the most bug
free framework I have seen and it *very* scalable. For instance
http://www.douban.com
is a Quixote-powered chinese site with more than 2 millions of pages
served per
day. To quote from a message on the Quixote mailing list:

"""
Just to report-in the progress we're making with a real-world Quixote
installation: yesterday douban.com celebrated its first 2 million-
pageview day. Quixote generated 2,058,207 page views. In addition,
there're about 640,000 search-engine requests. These put the combined
requests at  around 2.7 millions. All of our content pages are
dynamic, including the help and about-us pages.

We're still wondering if we're the busiest one of all the python/ruby
supported websites in the world.

Quixote runs on one dual-core home-made server (costed us US$1500).
We have three additional servers dedicated to lighttpd and mysql. We
use memcached extensively as well.

Douban.com is the most visible python establishment on the Chinese
web, so there's been quite a few django vs. quixote threads in the
Chinese language python user mailing lists.
"""

    Michele Simionato