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Facebook Releases Open Source Web Server

Posted by timothy on from the what-is-this-facebook-you-speak-of dept.

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."

6 of 113 comments (clear)

  1. I thought.. by rainhill · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Facebook was built with PHP?.

  2. Tornado is both by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Tornado includes both a Web server and a Web framework. The framework can take advantage of the (non-blocking) server architecture to achieve high performance. Apparently you can also run it under mod_wsgi, but I can't really see an advantage of using it in that scenario when compared to other Python frameworks.

  3. Re:How is this different from / better than Twiste by wisty · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Twisted is hard to learn. It's the sort of thing that programmers will re-implement just to avoid reading the documentation.

    Or maybe they wanted to have control. Whatever the case, they would have know. Everybody (who uses python for web work) would know a bit about Twisted ... it's on the front page of python.org

  4. Sooo... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

    If this webserver is supposed to be fast, than just how fast is it? Is it faster than lighttpd? YAWS? I'd like to know.

  5. Re:Please explain by lwsimon · · Score: 2, Interesting

    It is both - a non-blocking webserver and a framework designed to take advantage of that. Please click through the links (Is that British for RTFA?)

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  6. Re:that's pretty stupid by dkf · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Actually Python is pretty slow, about 50 times slower than C++, but that's usually ok since you can put the bottleneck into a C++ module.

    It's not quite as simple as that, since you also have to consider all the other factors involved (like amount of effort to stabilize the production solution, flexibility of the solution, etc.) Speed is only one - important - aspect.

    And if you're in an I/O bound process, it matters not at all; you're going to be waiting for devices to do their stuff anyway...

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