I just did a benchmark comparison on Tornado Web Server and Apache + PHP server. The result is pretty amazing.

What to test:

A simple Hello World application.

How:

ab -n 1000 -c 300 http://myserver.ip

Test Environment

OS: FreeBSD 7.1
CPU: Pentium III 933 MHz
Ram: 256 MB
PHP: 5.2.9
Python: 2.5.4
Tornado: 0.2

Result:

Apache + PHP:

Concurrency Level:      300
Time taken for tests:   3.515 seconds
Complete requests:      1000
Failed requests:        0
Write errors:           0
Total transferred:      255000 bytes
HTML transferred:       12000 bytes
Requests per second:    284.50 [#/sec] (mean)
Time per request:       1054.499 [ms] (mean)
Time per request:       3.515 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests)
Transfer rate:          70.85 [Kbytes/sec] received

Tornado Web Server:

Concurrency Level:      300
Time taken for tests:   1.907 seconds
Complete requests:      1000
Failed requests:        0
Write errors:           0
Total transferred:      168000 bytes
HTML transferred:       12000 bytes
Requests per second:    524.48 [#/sec] (mean)
Time per request:       571.993 [ms] (mean)
Time per request:       1.907 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests)
Transfer rate:          86.05 [Kbytes/sec] received

What do these numbers mean?

Tornado Web Server can handle 1.84 times more requests than Apache + PHP server in a given time!

–Derrick