Facebook Releases Open Source Web Server

Dan Jones writes "Ah the irony. The week Facebook is being asked to cough up source code to satisfy an alleged patent infringement, the company releases an open source Web server. The Web server framework that Facebook will offer as open source is called Tornado, was written in the Python language and is designed for quickly processing thousands of simultaneous connections. Tornado is a core piece of infrastructure that powers FriendFeed's real-time functionality, which Facebook maintains. While Tornado is similar to existing Web-frameworks in Python, it focuses on speed and handling large amounts of simultaneous traffic."

Comments

Re:that's pretty stupid

[BitZtream]

I don't know, Java, C++ and python all run at fine speeds if you write proper code for the language. C++ is probably the fastest in most cases, but Java is going to be a real close second written properly and on the right VM. While I don't like python myself, theres a reason it gets used in games, it can perform well enough to be used extensively if you can deal with compile time, which wouldn't really matter for long running process like a web server.

Perl isn't HORRIBLE, again, startup time is its biggest problem. PHP has issues, but when zend, precompiling and caching again, it works better than most expect.

I know nothing at all of Erlang so I won't speak to it.

MySQL is known for being fast as hell under the right workload, just gotta use it the right way.

Mix in some memcached and you can server a lot of hits.
Considering the number of extremely high traffic websites that use a mix of software about like this one, I think you'd have to be pretty stupid to put the blame on the software thats used.

Do you run a server farm that gets more traffic than Wikipedia, Yahoo or MySpace? I'll talk some shit about languages and say that everything should be written in C at the highest, by proper programmers so we don't end up with OSes that need gigs of ram to boot ... but ...

While possible, even I'm not arrogant enough to call them stupid.

I don't find anything about Wikipedia's setup 'impressive', but its certainly done properly. Their mix of php, python and mysql is all used exactly as is should be and serves a massive amount of people on a relatively low amount of processing power.

But again ... stupid? No, they are hardly stupid.