Twisted.web vs Tornado, a Performance test

http://www.apparatusproject.org/blog/2009/09/twisted-web-vs-tornado-performance-test/

by roder • 17 years ago

73 30 17 years ago

sophacles2• 17 years ago

So my first thought on this Tornado stuff was: why not glue twisted and tornado together? A quick look at the code suggests it is doable, and could help fix the "web mess" in twisted.

My second thought was: Why didn't they build this on libevent, and pyevent, which has a built-in non-blocking webserver which is pretty darned fast.

PhilChristensen2• 17 years ago

what 'web mess in twisted' are you referring to?

illumen• 17 years ago

There are two web implementations, and neither are complete(eg, twisted.web does not support even http 1.1). Even the twisted developers will tell you they are not happy with the web code in twisted. twisted.web2 was the future and twisted.web was to be depreciated, now twisted.web is the future and twisted.web2 is to be depreciated... the mess is still being cleaned up.

Link to the twisted web page describing the situation and the plan: http://twistedmatrix.com/trac/wiki/TwistedWebPlan

davidw• 17 years ago

Would be interesting to see mochiweb and a few other things thrown in there (maybe nginx for raw throughput).

siong1987• 17 years ago

http://siong1987.com/eventmachinethin-vs-twisted-vs-tornado

coconutrandom• 17 years ago

ironically an article about web server performance just got hosed by HN.

greut• 17 years ago

Google Cache got it right before it melt down: http://74.125.77.132/search?q=cache%3Awww.apparatusproject.o...

AndrewHampton• 17 years ago

It's back up.

igorgue2• 17 years ago

up again sorry :)

old-gregg2• 17 years ago

I wonder where standard Python's SimpleHttp server stands in there. I don't code Python much, but to me it seems that all these guys sit on top of Python's asyncore package, no?

simonw• 17 years ago

Tornado has its own C wrapper around epoll ( http://github.com/facebook/tornado/blob/9e24ae162d024e4049b8... ), but falls back to select() if the wrapper can't be compiled.

paul2• 17 years ago

It will also use Python 2.6's native epoll (see line 326 of http://github.com/facebook/tornado/blob/9a8bd2fb6fd6279be16d...)

anotherjesse• 17 years ago

I think Tornado is awesome since the applications you write can be read by normal people.

While Twisted is powerful (and as the poster said, in the same magnitude of performance), it has a tough learning curve.

Even if Tornado isn't successful, I think it just pushed the bar on how an async web framework can be written. I look forward to seeing other frameworks evolve as a response (I'm looking at you sinatra!).

dlsspy3• 17 years ago

I find twisted relatively easy to work with. There's no particular reason tornado can't sit atop twisted. Hopefully I'll get some time to do that this weekend.

The whole tornado vs. twisted thing is unfortunate, though. It exists in its current state because tornado is two different things: 1) a web framework 2) an async network stack.

#2 exists in core python and in twisted. If we transplant #1 to twisted, then it should be just as easy to develop web apps on twisted, except you get a whole lot of stuff for free.

moe3• 17 years ago

If we transplant #1 to twisted, then it should be just as easy to develop web apps on twisted, except you get a whole lot of stuff for free.

That would be... beyond awesome.

Rantenki• 17 years ago

I am shocked, SHOCKED I say, that nobody has brought up FapWS3 -> http://github.com/william-os4y/fapws3 , which runs about twice as fast for a "hello world" bench as Tornado, and wraps libevent for the async socket handling. As an added bonus, fapws3 can handle wsgi apps, django, etc...

drawkbox• 17 years ago

Both twisted and Tornado are very fun to work on and I think it is great they are focused on performance. This is nothing but good for web frameworks in Python.

WilliamLP• 17 years ago

The Deep Blue analogy is strained, now that Rybka 3 on a notebook computer will easily trounce the best human player in the world.

antonovka• 17 years ago

The results are missing latency numbers for the concurrent requests, and there's no indication of the amount of work being done to handle a request, which will have a significant impact on load performance.

That said, performance testing Python web server implementations seems bit like racing snails. If speed is why you're using Python, you're probably using the wrong tool.

coolmenu• 17 years ago

I see He test Tornado in MacBookPro, i think mac os dont have epoll, and tornado use select(). so i think he will test it in linux (2.6).

KevBurnsJr• 17 years ago

I've noticed some strange behavior with ab. Suggest testing with httperf as well.

Twisted.web vs Tornado, a Performance test

Related Stories