High-performance Python websites

[Nick Mellor]

On Nov 27, 3:26 am, Bruno Desthuilliers <bruno.
42.desthuilli... at websiteburo.invalid> wrote:
> 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.

Bruno and Kutlu,

It's a small start-up project.

By mentioning lawrence and other Django-powered websites, I was
pointing out that the problem of creating a high-performance
web solution using Python has already been solved in several places,
and the lessons learned have been given back to us
in the form of products like Django. I tend to agree with Bruno that
I'm unlikely to do a
better job than Django.

Thanks for your responses,

Nick