Tornado is an open source version of the scalable, non-blocking web server and tools that power FriendFeed. The FriendFeed application is written using a web framework that looks a bit like web.py or Google's webapp, but with additional tools and optimizations to take advantage of the underlying non-blocking infrastructure.
The framework is distinct from most mainstream web server frameworks (and certainly most Python frameworks) because it is non-blocking and reasonably fast. Because it is non-blocking and uses epoll, it can handle thousands of simultaneous standing connections, which means it is ideal for real-time web services. We built the web server specifically to handle FriendFeed's real-time features — every active user of FriendFeed maintains an open connection to the FriendFeed servers. (For more information on scaling servers to support thousands of clients, see The C10K problem.)
See the Tornado documentation for a detailed walkthrough of the framework.
Download and install
Automatic installation: Tornado is listed in PyPI and can be installed with pip or easy_install. If you do not already have libcurl installed you may need to install it separately; see the prerequisites section below. Note that the source distribution includes demo applications that are not present when Tornado is installed using pip or easy_install
Read more: Tornado