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The most surprising thing to me was that the language choice rather than the application architecture is what's blamed (in the excerpt) for only being able to s

• rudiger 16y ago
  At the time, it probably was.
• bryanh 16y ago
  I don't see how that is so surprising. At the time, Python was still a rather new interpreted language that was more or less focused on research applications. Nowadays there are tons of improvements, and let's not forget we have CPU cycles to burn.
• evgen 16y ago
  To put this into context, at the time you would have been going via cgi scripts or maybe trying to embed directly into apache. Mod_python did not exist, asyncore was the only thing you had to do async callouts so that you did not block the thread, etc. There is a reason perl was considered state of the art for serving web pages at this point in history. To give you a bit of an example, YahooMail (nee RocketMail) was basically a bunch of html wrappers around python code to read/manipulate mbox files and you would have been amazed at the amount of hardware it required to keep that performant; google had to be faster and was doing a lot of background work that we never had to deal with. In the late 90s there was just not the same set of options available in the standard library, people were just learning what was required for horizontal scaling, and I can easily see how the added burden that Python 1.4 would have imposed compared to C or C++ would be a deal-killer when it came time for a re-write.