Tornado, the real-time web server that powers FriendFeed, now open source.

September 11, 2009

Facebook announced Tornado as new open source web server framework, it can be used to serve thousands of simultaneous connections, its high performance is really interesting, i think ill test it in the coming days. checkout the following links: http://developers.facebook.com/news.php?blog=1&story=301 http://bret.appspot.com/entry/tornado-web-server friendfeed website: http://friendfeed.com some details: Tornado is a non-blocking Web server framework written in Python, designed to handle thousands of simultaneous connections, making it ideal for real-time Web services. Some of the distinctive features of Tornado:

All the basic site building blocks - Tornado comes with built-in support for a lot of the most difficult and tedious aspects of web development, including templates, signed cookies, user authentication, localization, aggressive static file caching, cross-site request forgery protection, and third party authentication like Facebook Connect. You only need to use the features you want, and it is easy to mix and match Tornado with other frameworks.
Real-time services - Tornado supports large numbers of concurrent connections. It is easy to write real-time services via long polling or HTTP streaming with Tornado. Every active user of FriendFeed maintains an open connection to FriendFeed's servers.
High performance - Tornado is pretty fast relative to most Python web frameworks. We ran some simple load tests against some other popular Python frameworks, and Tornado's baseline throughput was over four times higher than the other frameworks: