Facebook releases the "Tornado" web server [LWN.net]

Facebook releases the "Tornado" web server

Posted Sep 11, 2009 17:21 UTC (Fri) by zooko (guest, #2589)
Parent article: Facebook releases the "Tornado" web server

There is discussion on Bret Taylor's blog: http://bret.appspot.com/entry/tornado-web-server

You can color me skeptical of his remark that he stopped using Twisted because it was buggy and
"demo-quality software", considering that Twisted has extensive unit tests and a hard policy of not
accepting any commits without accompanying tests, whereas Tornado appears to have no tests
whatsoever.

Facebook releases the "Tornado" web server

Posted Sep 13, 2009 19:24 UTC (Sun) by njs (subscriber, #40338) [Link] (1 responses)

What I get from his comment was that he found twisted.web in particular to be unsuitable for his task (that seems plausible to me, twisted.web is not twisted's crown jewel, though hopefully this will spur people to catch it up with tornado), and then it wasn't worth bringing in twisted as a dependency just for the core polling loop, when writing a non-portable one is only maybe 50 lines of code. Plus some disorientation at the twisted way of doing things, which does seem overcomplex until you figure out which pieces of documentation to read and start trying to write multi-protocol servers.

Facebook releases the "Tornado" web server

Posted Sep 15, 2009 12:59 UTC (Tue) by jamesh (guest, #1159) [Link]

That isn't too surprising. The first thing that threw me was the choice between twisted.web and twisted.web2: the first is obsolete (or will become obsolete), while the other hasn't really moved forward and is missing a number of features from the original.

And the twisted.web.client code is fairly primitive, lacking support for keep alives among other things.

That said, I agree that the core twisted code would probably have made a good base.