The answer may depend somewhat on whether your app is doing mostly storage (filessystem) or calculations (cpu).
If you need to handle a fair number of sockets but do little processing, you may wish to look at the standard modules asyncore/asynchat. But Twisted is not a bad advice :o) Maybe a little more threshold to get started and you will have to co-deploy it with your app. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
