Tornado
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Tornado is an open-source web framework that was developed to build high-performance, scalable web applications. It uses an asynchronous and non-blocking model to handle requests efficiently at large scale. This event-driven approach is better suited for applications with frequent updates and real-time features compared to traditional synchronous frameworks. While Tornado provides benefits like speed and scalability, it also has limitations since some operations like database access are blocking and require architectural changes.
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Tornado
- 1. Tornado … and the asynchronous web
- 2. How we got here The web started with the idea of sharing complex documents. Web 1.0 sites are limited by how quickly the user can read Performance was solved by caching and distributing the load
- 3. This got us pretty far:
- 4. Social Breakdown Most people realized that the traditional model was breaking down with social sites, although anyone needing frequent updates was affected The workload breaks many assumptions: frequent updates visible to arbitrary subsets of users, with latency being a big deal Traditional coping strategies fail: Content can't be cached Heavy interdependencies complicate scaling wide Visibility logic can be complex
- 5. Changing the model Comet: long-lived request "pushing" data as it's generated <script>chat.addMessage("foo");</script> … time passes … <script>chat.addMessage(";)");</script> … or long polling: GET /ajax/chat … time passes … {messages: ["lol"], highwater: 12345} GET /ajax/chat?i=12345
- 6. Asynchronous I/O Handling scale just become mandatory and that requires switching to an event-driven back-end to match the event- driven clients Completely different model - but very familiar to JavaScript devs or people with desktop experience: (from http://www.tornadoweb.org/documentation#non-blocking-asynchronous-requests)
- 7. Tornado Tornado is the opensourced technology behind friendfeed. com (now Facebook) Targetted at the problem of building high-performance, scalable web applications: Templating, reusable widgets, localization Signed Cookies Authenticates against common services (Google, Twitter, Facebook, etc.) Fast:
- 8. Caveats & Future Directions Bad News: Targeted is another way of saying limited Blocking APIs are hard to avoid - you'll probably need architectural changes to deal with databases, files, other web services, etc. Good News: Asynchronous I/O is becoming very common Twisted is finally getting some usability attention HTML 5's WebSocket will clean up long-lived connections