Graham Dumpleton

It's worth pointing to Graham Dumpleton's blog [1] -- he seems to be the Python world's web hosting ninja. See the great slide deck [2] from his recent talk on hosting python web apps [3] -- the deck nicely captures the recent state of the world. Apache2 + mod_wsgi in Daemon mode is probably the most common approach (especially for VPSs), although I know several people who prefer nginx + gunicorn + supervisor. Both are sane and stable options at this point. (The python web frameworks themselves all speak WSGI and there are about seventeen million of 'em to choose from.) [1] http://blog.dscpl.com.au/ [2] http://modwsgi.googlecode.com/files/mod_wsgi-pycon-sydney-2011.pdf [3] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PWIvm-uloMg

It's not the same - you have to compile Nginx with mod_wsgi support. It's not as simple as doing an "apt-get install nginx" and it may compile with your version, or it may not compile. Also, read this: http://blog.dscpl.com.au/2009/05/blocking-requests-and-nginx-version-o… mod_wsgi is an interesting example. Surely it has the wrong architecture for Nginx and something better could surely be written. But mod_wsgi for Apache simply kicks ass, being a server that manages everything for you with low overhead and good performance caracteristics. No need for supervisord or any of that crap. Some people go as far as recommending running Nginx in front of Apache, with all the overhead that brings, just for mod_wsgi (although the same could be said about mod_php). That's the thing about Apache - it's so mature and has so much traction that you can find quality plugins for anything and everything, being an all you can eat buffet. But then if you're going to put Nginx in front of Apache, why go with Nginx instead of Varnish: http://www.varnish-cache.org/ -- which is designed from the ground-up to function as a high-performance proxy cache (the Nginx plugin for proxy caching sucks donkey balls IMHO) What I'm trying to say here is that Nginx is very far from a one-size-fits-all. It's awesome for at least one website I've got written in Ruby on Rails and I'm using it in combination with Passenger (Ruby's mod_wsgi). But for all my other use-cases, I'm starting with Apache…

There's also Graham Dumpleton's "How you implemented your Python decorator is wrong" blog post - http://blog.dscpl.com.au/2014/01/how-you-implemented-your-python.html and the related "Decorators and monkey patching" list http://blog.dscpl.com.au/p/decorators-and-monkey-patching.html

Specifically this link: http://blog.dscpl.com.au/2009/05/blocking-requests-and-nginx-version-o…

As far as I know (correct me if I'm wrong) passenger is maintenance free. Anything else wouldn't make much sense anyways. It maintains a pool of workers and distributes load over them, just as it should be. mod_wsgi for apache seems to do the same so I should have been more specific: I'm still waiting for a proper mod_wsgi for nginx. The nginx mod_wsgi is not the same as the apache version. It has some very unfortunate problems which effectively rule it out for production use: http://blog.dscpl.com.au/2009/05/blocking-requests-and-nginx-version-o…