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 )