Good things sometimes happen to the open source community. Since Facebook acquisition of FriendFeed, a bunch of technologies were released to the wild, including, most notably, a Tornado web server written in Python. The Tornado is touted as a «a scalable, non-blocking web server and web framework». See Wikipedia article
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tornado_HTTP_Server on some details on the performance of that server, as well as some comparison with other web servers.
Here's the chart, taken from Wikipedia:
Performance on AMD Opteron, 2.4GHz, 4 Cores
| Server |
Setup |
Requests per Second |
| Tornado |
nginx, 4 frontends |
8213 |
| Tornado |
1 single threaded frontend |
3353 |
| Django |
Apache/mod_wsgi |
2223 |
| web.py |
Apache/mod_wsgi |
2066 |
| CherryPy |
standalone |
785 |
The numbers looked interesting, so I decided to benchmark Tornado myself to check out how it fares against some Erlang tools.
( Erlang, Yaws, Tornado benchmark followsCollapse ) 