I tried every variation I could get to work including tornado, asyncio, and pypy. In my simple "how many websockets can I open" tests python would start erroring by 10,000 (no Django, just an empty websocket) while node hit 40,000 and was still climbing. Eventually I concluded it was a case of "with sufficient thrust pigs fly just fine". I still like python; just doesn't seem to be worth the effort to try to adapt blocking libraries into a non-blocking use case.

That makes sense. I'm actually very pragmatic when it comes to this kind of stack and I'll be happy to replace my current Tornado frontend with a Node frontend when I hit the limit (for now it's a very niche usecase, just me and a few friends, so it might be that I never need to improve it.)

This is promising: http://swampdragon.net

Oh! Interesting, thanks for the link!