Stand Alone Python Servers

The Python programming language provides a full-featured suite of both high and low-level networking capabilities. This allows for stand-alone web servers to be written in Python. For instance, CherryPy is an object publishing framework for Python with a very powerful built-in HTTP server.

In production environments, Python is often run behind a more production-ready web server such as Apache. The main reason for doing so is performance. Web servers such as Apache are written low-level languages and thus have a raw computing advantage. They are generally mature as software packages. The have been tried and tested for much longer than most Python web servers.

Another reason may be architecture. If there are several other production services that already use Apache, then it would make sense for consistency. It is much easier to maintain a single web server than many, often very different web servers.

If one were to deploy a single Python web application with a single web server, is deploying to a production-ready HTTP server really necessary? Are the performance gains really all that noticeable in the grand end-user scheme of things? As for stability, this is the kind of thing that should be rigorously tested before even considering placing the stable label on the server to begin with.