That's awesome, thanks for the offer, I'll definitely take you up on it and ping you if we run into problems scaling up that live endpoint using Python.
As a side-note, this is why I love the software engineering community: everyone's always so willing to share knowledge and help each other out. Let's hope we never lose that as a community!
Yep, but we liked Eventlet better because of the simpler programming model and better support for things like psycopg2 (our database driver). So far it's worked out great--it's held up really well under our current amount of load.
That said, Tornado is a really neat piece of software, and it worked very well for FriendFeed and others. It really just came down to personal preference.
In what way does Tornado not support psycopg2? Because the Tornado code includes some convenience functions for working with an unmodified MySQLdb driver, I assume that FriendFeed also used the MySQLdb driver with no modifications. If the MySQLdb driver works with Tornado, shouldn't psycopg2 also work?
By using an unmodified MySQLdb driver, FriendFeed did not make asynchronous calls to the database. I searched around and found this comment w/ response from Paul Buchheit about the issue: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1479301
Do you need to make async calls to the database because your queries are slow?
As a side-note, this is why I love the software engineering community: everyone's always so willing to share knowledge and help each other out. Let's hope we never lose that as a community!