Tuesday, September 18, 2012

Python Fastest Web Framework

What is the fastest web framework for Python? In this post we will examine a trivial 'Hello World!'. See also:
  1. Performance Benchmarks
  2. Code Quality
  3. Template Engines
The application (see source) is written for various Python web frameworks and deployed to uWSGI application container (version 1.9.6 on CPython 2.7.4/3.3.1) and gunicorn (version 0.15.0 on PyPy 1.9). Latest available versions as of this writing (March 15, 2013):
  1. bobo 1.0.0
  2. bottle 0.11.6
  3. cherrypy 3.2.4
  4. circuits 2.1.0
  5. django 1.5.1
  6. flask 0.9
  7. pyramid 1.4
  8. tornado 3.0.1
  9. turbogears 2.2.0
  10. web.py 0.37
  11. web2py 2.1.1
  12. wheezy.web 0.1.365
Let setup few prerequisites to be able run this in clean debian testing installation. 
apt-get install make python-dev python-virtualenv \
 mercurial unzip
# Up TCP connection limits
sysctl net.core.somaxconn=2048
sysctl net.ipv4.tcp_max_syn_backlog=2048
The source code is hosted on bitbucket, let clone it into some directory and setup virtual environment (this will download all necessary package dependencies per framework listed above). 
hg clone https://bitbucket.org/akorn/helloworld
cd helloworld/01-welcome && make env
The make file has a target for each framework and runs particular example in uWSGI, e.g. in order to run django application just issue make django.
The installation for PyPy has own target so issue the following: 
make pypy
In order to run things on PyPy issue the command like this one (this way you specify you need gunicorn server and use PyPy environment): 
make wheezy.web SERVER=gunicorn ENV=pypy-1.9
The throughtput (requests served per second) was captured using apache benchmark (concurrecy level 1K, number of requests 1M) for http://yourserver:8080/welcome: 
 cpython2.7 pypy 1.9 cpython3.3
 uwsgi gunicorn uwsgi
bobo 20736 20633 -
bottle 24366 22229 23882
cherrypy 6418 9179 -
circuits 5797 3837 -
django 16007 16848 15965
flask 12483 14399 -
pyramid 23360 20202 24367
tornado 15861 17265 13825
turbogears 2764 5808 -
web.py 5023 - -
web2py 4065 2769 -
wheezy.web 24703 22323 24858
wsgi 24938 23272 24955
The benchmark results above 22K are not reliable due to hardware limitations.

Isolated Benchmark

In order to provide more reliable benchmark I get rid of application server and network boundary. As a result I simulated a valid WSGI request and isolated calls just to framework alone (the source code is here). Here are raw numbers: 
cpython 2.7
 msec rps tcalls funcs
bobo* 9414 10622 116 65
bottle 2832 35308 65 32
cherrypy* 54320 1841 600 165
circuits* 130650 765 504 112
django 13484 7416 144 75
flask 18861 5302 207 106
pyramid 5595 17875 65 48
tornado 15068 6636 201 66
turbogears* 301980 331 1706 331
web.py* 595932 168 2191 65
web2py 153727 651 417 143
wheezy.web 1793 55786 25 23
wsgi 281 355255 8 8
pypy 1.9
 msec rps tcalls funcs
bobo* 1884 53076 114 64
bottle 803 124559 63 32
cherrypy* 53630 1864 652 185
circuits* 89780 1114 509 112
django 3395 29456 138 73
flask 10273 9735 215 110
pyramid 1819 54990 91 53
tornado* 3465 28864 176 62
turbogears* 275830 363 1705 347
web.py* - 29 12868 73
web2py 189691 527 562 177
wheezy.web 475 210341 26 24
wsgi 287 349001 8 8
cpython 3.3
 msec rps tcalls funcs
bobo not installed
bottle 4377 22848 79 41
cherrypy not installed
django 13572 7368 141 74
flask not installed
pyramid 6611 15125 87 53
tornado 18331 5455 220 74
turbogears not installed
webpy not installed
web2py not installed
wheezy.web 1968 50818 27 25
wsgi 378 264275 10 10
msec - a total time taken in milliseconds, rps - requests processed per second, tcalls - total number of call made by corresponding web framework, funcs - a number of unique functions used.
ATTENTION: The web frameworks marked with * (asterisk) experience memory leaks in this test.

Environment Specification
  • Client: Intel Core 2 Quad CPU Q6600 @ 2.40GHz × 4, Kernel 3.2.41-2 i686
  • Server: Intel Xeon CPU X3430 @ 2.40GHz x 4, Kernel 3.2.41-2 amd64, uwsgi 1.9.6
  • Debian Testing, Python 2.7.4, LAN 1 Gb
Python has a number of web frameworks. A trivial application gives you an idea where particular web framework stands in terms of performance and internal effectivity.

40 comments :

  1. Great benchmark! For someone who's not familiar with all the frameworks, it would be great if you could link the list items to the respective benchmarks.

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  2. Something is wrong here. Can you post the web2py code you are running? Did you remove the scaffolding models (they do lots of authentication logic)? Did you run it with -N (to disable background cron processes, a web2py only feature)? Are you using a template (if so are you using a template for other frameworks)? In web2py session handling is always on, did you enable sessions in other frameworks? Can you post any code that can will enable to reproduce your results at least for web2py and one of the other frameworks?

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    1. The link to the source is in the post, as well as how to run it.

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    2. The situation is actually even worse... during test I have noticed huge memory leak.

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    3. I have rebuild environment and re-run web2py test. The problem is gone, no memory leaks. There were no need to change anything.

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    4. Thank you Andriy for updating the benchmarks. For readers out there, the web2py benchmark still includes session handling (session is created but although sessions is not saved) and internationalization handling (lookup per-request translation file to match requested accept-language).

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    5. Sorry but is the chart updated for web2.py?

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    6. The benchmark raw results and chart correspond to latest version of each web framework at the time the post was updated.

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  3. Hello Andriy. We are looking into this. You have at least one problem. In the web2py example you must add session.forget() otehrwise your app is creating a session file at every request. This mans you have a huge number of session files and access gets slower and slower. Disk access alone can account for the numbers you get. We are discussing the memory leak since many of us have never seen the problem. A user believe it to be a uwsgi configuration issue (https://groups.google.com/d/msg/web2py/Yrtrj3BSFl4/_06tIzqJNzQJ).

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    1. You have to be kidding, right? I am using a `hello world` application per examples provided by corresponding frameworks... including web2py. Let collaborate this via email or supply a patch so it doesn't bounce back and forward. Thanks.

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    2. uWSGI configuration is taken from here http://projects.unbit.it/uwsgi/wiki/Example. That most likely a source of all web2py deployments using uWSGI...

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    4. +1 Massimo - nice way to handle a rather rude/ defensive response.

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  4. For readers out there. A "hello world" app in web2py is not a "hello word" app since web2py does not follow "explicit is better then implicit". Out of the box it is optimized for rapid prototyping and not for speed. Web2py does lots of stuff out of the box whether you like it or not. Anyway, the main problem here is probably saving sessions, and there is a way to disable it.

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    1. and you understand the risk web2py application (that use sessions) experience in production...

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    2. Your argument isn't valid Massimo. You want web2py to be benchmarked disabling those features because it scores low when they are enabled, but django has those features enabled too and scores high anyway.
      For a "hello world" benchmark the framework should be tested with no fine tunning. That's the purpose of this kind of benchmarks.

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    3. If you check the source you will notice that I tried to pick a minimal possible application stack for given web framework: turned off debug, disabled logging, removed `unnecessary` middleware, etc. If I missed anything... please just let me know.

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  5. Yes. DoS. In fact, old web2py was always creating a session file but new web2py only saves session if it changes and is not empty. Let's find out why your benchmarks do not agree with yours. Perhaps is not the problem.

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  6. I think you mean bobo 0.2?

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    1. no, I am using latest available version from pypi.

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  7. Andriy, Thank you for doing the research and sharing this. It is very interesting to see pypy not living up to it's benchmarking hype. Possible extension to this test if you inclined to do so would be to include Apache + mod_wsgi stack test, and other languages frameworks, Haskell; I know the latter is very unlikely :).

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    1. I personally believe pypy is the future. If you compare gunicorn on cpython (make wsgi SERVER=gunicorn) vs pypy (make wsgi SERVER=gunicorn ENV=pypy-1.9) you will see cpython is not that good... In my believe uwsgi is the right application server to be used with cpython, while gunicorn for pypy (I haven't chance to see uwsgi+pypy since it is not a primary direction of its development team). What relates to apache mod_wsgi: it all way good except performance, so I stick with uwsgi to be able to see the difference. It is actually a challenge to benchmark anything across other languages since many factors applies... I tried answer it for python.

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  8. You forgot circuits.web (1) :/

    cheers
    James

    [1] http://pypi.python.org/pypi/circuits/

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  9. Sorry mate but these "benchmarks" are so damn pointless.

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    1. These benchmarks give you an idea:
      (1) where web frameworks stand in terms of internal effectivity running a simple thing
      (2) how various python implementations handle it
      (3) all are good (and sufficient for their communities)

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  10. I think these results are very useful. It's certanily given me some insight as to some aspects of circuits and circuits.web I can improve upon. It's also a good measure of the quality (or lack thereof) of some of the frameworks and server implementations (even tornado doesn't suffer from memory leaks).

    --JamesMills / prologic

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  11. I would be curious to see how the recently released TurboGears2.2 behaves related to the other frameworks. Some of the performance improvements that has been done in the 2.3 branch have been backported to 2.2 so there has been a sensible improvement over the past versions.

    Let me know if you need any help setting up a benchmark for TG, I would be glad to help.

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    2. Thank your for your test!
      Results are interesting, I'm going to try to replicate them using your configurations, how did you check for the memory leaks?

      I saw that the benchmarks got conducted with minimal setups for the other frameworks, have you set full_stack=False in config/middlware.py and disabled in config/app_cfg.py most optional things like:

      base_config.use_toscawidgets2 = False
      base_config.use_toscawidgets = False
      base_config.i18n_enabled = False
      base_config.disable_request_extensions = True
      base_config.serve_static = False

      As the speedup work is happening all on 2.3 branch we didn't have any compared benchmark for 2.2 and I was curious to see how it behaved.

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    3. I have isolated turbogears and noticed constant residential memory grow.

      The Makefile target creates project using paster quistart, than few files are copied (take look at source code). The ini file was updated per production configuration comments.

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  12. Not sure why this older article showed up in my feed reader this morning but its appearance caused me to finally install and run the benchmarks. The takeaway for me was... choose the framework that best fits your mind or task, hopefully both at the same time. They all perform about the same when run with uwsgi. I mostly use DurusWorks which is an evolutionary brother to Quixote, one of the older web frameworks out there. Neither has a large community of users.

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    1. The post has been updated due to community request for django python3. The difference between frameworks well seen in three others: routing, reverse urls and caching.

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  13. PS, meant to thank you for putting together the bundle of apps and tests. Regardless of my conclusion it was still interesting to go through them and I appreciate the effort.

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  14. In the benchmarks what app server does wsgi refer to?

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    1. wsgi test (as well as all others) is hosted in uwsgi for python2.7/3.3 and gunicorn for pypy.

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  15. Thank you so much for doing this benchmark. I found out the hard way after writing an app that the framework wouldn't scale above 500 RPS regardless of settings. Talk about dissapointment! It's crazy that so many frameworks are so far away from pure WSGI perf.

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  16. Have you tested the new Falcon framework? It is said to be very fast. Would be interesting to see how it compares with the others.
    http://falconframework.org/

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    1. http://faruk.akgul.org/blog/python-web-frameworks-benchmark/

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