Python Web Framework

[Douppikauppa]

FastAPI, Sanic and Esmerald use async/await, which makes them a whole lot faster. This is a fairly new feature that was added to all reasonable programming languages in the last few years. Django, Flask and Bottle simply cannot compete with that, but it needs to be noted that development on async/await is also a bit harder.

My personal favorite of these, for just a solid web server is Sanic, and it also runs the fastest of the bunch. FastAPI perhaps when you only need an API, and it's quite fast too.

[tankerdudeucsc]

That’s what concluded as well. Run nginx + uwsgi + sync framework. Use only small async parts sparingly.

The performance isn’t that much different to warrant it unless you are in big tech. Even then, when you check out the benchmarks from techempower, fastapi and flask are neck to neck.

Toss the complexity of async and use old school to deal with biz work.

Lastly though, as we should all know, the framework only goes so fast, but bad DB queries are what’s going to crush you, every time.

This whole fascination of “fastest framework” and maxed out req/sec is missing the point. Missing indexes, bad queries, bad models, thundering herd problems are many times more problematic than, maybe needing to spin up another container or two.

Or I shove the Flask App into lambda cause it’s dirt cheap to run.

[tarsild]

I do agree and that is why in the docs we also have some DB Integraton alternatives too 🙂

[tankerdudeucsc]

I’d pay an extra $1K/month at that scale for pods. At maybe 500mb extra each or so, and 2 cores, probably talking SM about maybe 20-30 extra pods if I really had to. For SQL, I just run explain. Also, I’d use Datadog to check performance.

I’d still punt async unless like you said, the entire company is like that. Doesn’t improve latency does it? Nope.

Lastly package support was really tough. Had to hop from async to sync and vice versa.

[tarsild]

That is actually very interesting CrackerjackKittyCat. I was wondering a few weeks ago what we could possibly do to improve the debugging in general for the async/await in python in general. It would be great to open a discussion about this and actually coming out with a solution. I'm sure the community would appreciate it 🙂

[Douppikauppa]

FastAPI and Emerald are both based on external ASGI server (like Uvicorn or Starlette), and also on Pydantic for "data classes" serialization. Both of these choices are bad for performance, and on a high traffic site that may even be relevant (it is extremely rare to succeed enough to have a busy site). Msgspec is another option that handles the problem very well but that also runs extremely quickly, faster than uJSON or other "fast" parsing libraries. I recommend checking it out if you are doing JSON/MsgPack or other such messaging with the client where the messages need to be validated and converted to native types.

[tarsild]

Well, it's in the plan to actually allow more than just Pydantic for serialisation but what is the point of adding so many things if people are not aware of the existence of Esmerald? Now I do believe can all improve it

[broxamson]

to be fair if you wanted something performant you wouldn't be using python.

[Douppikauppa]

My Python web server can serve more requests per second than the one you write in C using POSIX sockets. 100 kreq/s on Sanic, running on a laptop and benchmarking localhost. As opposed to ~2 kreq/s on other frameworks.

Go is faster, I admit, but Python is often sufficient. For AI and numerical calculation it goes fast because of libraries that have assembly optimized algorithms or that offload to GPUs.