Decline of the Tornado Web Server - What happened?

This graph displays the average requests/second that the python tornado framework can handle graphed over time by commits. Very surprising and also a little concerning since I am relying on Tornado for my current projects. Just wanted to make sure that you all were made aware of this in case you are considering using Tornado for your own projects (although I have had nothing but positive experiences with it).<p>Source - <a href="http://groups.google.com/group/python-tornado/browse_thread/thread/94b45e815ac992ac#" rel="nofollow">http://groups.google.com/group/python-tornado/browse_thread/...</a>

Here we see the movement from "Only 200 lines of code! Does 8 jillion requests per second!" to "Does things correctly, works in the real world!". Welcome to life.

This was the feedback from the twisted community when it launched. There were lots of issues they found in a cursory glance.<p>My complaint (and I heard the same complaint from a developer as recently as yesterday) was that they tossed away all compatibility with everything that existed in order to solve one specific problem. Then people tried to use it as a general solution.<p>I spent an hour or two soon after tornado was released figuring out how to take the good parts of tornado and the good parts of twisted and put them together for this reason: <a href="http://dustin.github.com/2009/09/12/tornado.html" rel="nofollow">http://dustin.github.com/2009/09/12/tornado.html</a> The result (without any attempt to optimize it) was a reducing in raw performance, but the ability to actually do ridiculous numbers of things you can't do in tornado even today.

Wow, didn't expect this to make the front page of HN. There's more context in the groups thread (<a href="http://groups.google.com/group/python-tornado/browse_thread/thread/94b45e815ac992ac" rel="nofollow">http://groups.google.com/group/python-tornado/browse_thread/...</a>), but the short version is that a change to abstract away some error handling with the python 'with' statement had a surprising performance impact. When used with the @contextlib.contextmanager decorator, the with statement is more than 25 times as expensive as a try/except statement.

Very cool. I'm using Tornado for my projects and I gotta say, I'm really enjoying the minimalism and design. I can dive into the source and tweak it fairly easily.<p>Recently I tweaked the templating engine to accept keyword arguments in a namespace for the {% include %} command. Anyone interested in my patch?

What a cool visualization! Between Github and a continuous integration benchmarking tool, you could generate this for any project. I would pay to have it.

glad to see Ben Darnell is on top of it:<p><a href="http://groups.google.com/group/python-tornado/msg/681856dbb421bec7" rel="nofollow">http://groups.google.com/group/python-tornado/msg/681856dbb4...</a>

Don't miss the graph/chart (in the 'Tornado Performance Trend' Google doc). Yet another Tornado (and node.js and Deft) benchmark available on <a href="http://www.deftserver.org" rel="nofollow">http://www.deftserver.org</a>

The link takes me to a Google Docs login page

Image of the rendered graph (because it was going to raw data view due to how many people were viewing): <a href="http://imgur.com/YhTdg.jpg" rel="nofollow">http://imgur.com/YhTdg.jpg</a><p>The gray line represents the 2009 year marker.