High-performance Python websites

[Bruno Desthuilliers]

Nick Mellor a écrit :
> Hi all,
> 
> I'm contemplating setting up a Python-powered website for the tourist
> industry, which will involve a web service, a good deal of XML
> processing, and a Django-powered front-end. If the project works, it
> could get a lot of traffic. I'm sure it can be done, but I'm looking
> to find out more about how existing high-volume Python sites have
> managed their workload. Can anyone give me examples of high-volume
> Python-powered websites, if possible with some idea of their
> architecture?

youtube once used quite a lot of Python IIRC. You may be able to find 
relevant infos on the net.

While I may disagree with Kutlu on some points[1], it's clear that the 
key to handling huge traffic is the ability to scale up. So better to 
avoid solutions that make it hard - or impossible - to setup load 
balancing, replication etc. Now that doesn't mean than decent 
performance and reasonnable memory usage are not a concern - even a 
simple website with moderate traffic can become a PITA if you choose the 
wrong tools / architecture (Plone perfs problems anyone ?).

Anyway : just make sure your solution is both simple enough to avoid 
becoming a resource-eater yet serious enough to allow for fine-grained 
caching, load-balancing and the like.


[1] like reinventing your own framework - whatever architecture 
(including non-blocking IO/event-based server like Twisted) you settle 
on, chances are most of the grunt work has already been done, and 
probably better than what you could come with in a reasonable amount of 
time - unless you have a really BIG budget of course.