Let us be blunt about this. Web2py is out there megalomaniacally presenting itself as all things to all people at a web framework level. As it is now, Web2py is a very impressive achievement.
At a purely technical level Web2py is superior to Django in a large number of important aspects. But that is not the point. Leaving aside the irritating Django fan-boys, Django does not present itself as all things to all people. At the top level Django presents itself as a commercially backed niche product suitable for simple content presentation of small organisations (such as regional newspapers). If we take a straight comparison with a completely different web framework that presents itself as all things to all people. such as DotNet, then web2py must accept there are issues for comparison that go way beyond pet issues found in the narrow confines of the academic or fan-boy environments. Here are some simple comparison points. 1) Corporate backing independent of lead developers 2) Proven scalability around simple metrics 3) The 'largest' projects DotNet has been around for ten years now and has very wide penetration. Where is Web2py going to be in ten years and what will its penetration be? Frankly I cannot imagine someone with Massimo's talents as remaining interested in Web2py, despite his deep involvement now in Web2py. Massimo in a prior life was a talented high energy physicist, why shouldn't he change again? Who knows, maybe a vice chancellor of the University of Chicago trying to keep a lid on embarrassing student/ staff scandals or fraudulent research, or lobbying for grants? I am not being unfair to Web2py. With regard to Django and Disqus, 30% of about 100 servers (about 30 servers) just appear to run Apache + mod_wsgi. This presumably is where Django lives. The other 70% of servers are for databases, caching, load balancing and for other Python scripts. This information comes from http://www.slideshare.net/zeeg/djangocon-2010-scaling-disqus. Since we can expect a lot of the requests are for the same information, we can expect caching is very important. Disqus claims to be able to reach 17,000 requests for seconds or about 570 requests per second per Apache server. Suppose each request lasts no longer than a generous 200ms on average then Apache needs to be able to maintain about 114 requests at once. Since Apache spawns or maintains a thread for each request, this means that each server needs to be able to maintain nearly 114 threads per server at once. I am not impressed by this. Consider that Lighttpd can handle 10,000 requests per second ON A SINGLE SERVER using year 2000 technology. John Heenan On Dec 2, 9:46 pm, Tom Atkins <minkto...@gmail.com> wrote: > I'm assuming John Heenan's criticisms of web2py would apply equally to > Django? > > Please correct me if I'm wrong. > > Django can scale pretty well - here's a presentation showing how Disqus have > scaled their Django app to 250 million visitors a month and a peak of 17,000 > requests per second to Django with Apache and mod_wsgi: > > http://nosql.mypopescu.com/post/1409154668/disqus-scaling-the-worlds-... > > Presumably web2py could do the same?
