What Is Tornado?

Tornado is a powerful, scalable web server written in Python. It’s robust enough to handle serious web traffic, yet is lightweight to set up and write for, and can be used for a variety of applications and utilities.

The Tornado we now know is based on a web server framework that was first developed by Bret Taylor and others for FriendFeed, and later open sourced by Facebook when they acquired FriendFeed. Unlike traditional web servers that maxed out at around 10,000 simultaneous connections, Tornado was written with performance in mind, aiming to solve the C10K problem, so by design it’s an extremely high-performance framework. It’s also packed with tools for dealing with security and user authentication, social networks, and asynchronous interaction with external services like databases and web APIs.