Pirates Use Flask, the Navy Uses Django

Interested in knowing what backend setup you have that allows you to scale up to 27,000+ while using Flask:

1. How many application servers are you using?

2. How much RAM, CPU cores, etc. does each application server have?

3. How many database servers?

4. Which web server are you using?

5. Which WSGI server are you using?

6. What are the configuration settings for your WSGI server (mainly the ones related to number of processes, threads, etc.)

My motivation for asking was to get a sense of what it takes to serve higher traffic from a Flask API. I've yet to find a good resource that mentions what sort of web server/WSGI configuration is needed to serve high load applications that use Flask. Obviously, proper load testing is needed to really determine a reasonable setup, but I think having something ballparked from an actual production deployment could be helpful.

>Who uses Flask?

>Reddit

I'm pretty sure Reddit is running Pylons.[1][2]

That being said, I really wish Pyramid[1] (formerly repoze.bfg) would get a little bit more recognition in the Python web community. I particularly like Pyramid for its supports for Python 3 (even 3.2, which means it works well with PyPy3), good documentation (although sometimes a bit overwhelming) and the fact that the framework grow very well along with the app size. You can swap out or extend nearly everything in Pyramid, from renderers (Mako, Jinja, anything) to session object down to request objects, and may be even more.

It's true that these features are not unique to Pyramid and dependency with Zope components scare people off, but after few years of using several frameworks (started with web.py, then Django, Pylons, Werkzeug although not exactly a framework, Flask, etc.) I've found Pyramid to have the right balance between extensibility and simplicity. It could be a single file simple application if you want, or a big guy framework with authentication policy built-in if you ever needed one.

Interestingly, I got a tie between Flask and Django in the worksheet.

[1]: http://www.pylonsproject.org/projects/pylons-framework/about

[2]: https://github.com/reddit/reddit/search?utf8=✓&q=pylons

[3]: http://www.pylonsproject.org/projects/pyramid/about

I recently built a moderate sized project with Bottle. The application won't get many simultaneous users as it's for a single small company. The single file, no dependency setup was nice. It's similar to Flask but simpler... (in fact I think it was the inspiration for Flask if I'm not mistaken). I was even able to use Jinja2. Kind of missed Flask-Login, but Bottle had something adequate built right in. Worth a look for a small project.

I really hate this 'pirates are cool' meme. Pirates were vicious high seas bandits: they robbed, kidnapped, raped and murdered. Navies hunted them down (and still do today[1]).

That said, after using Django for the better part of a decade, I'm all about Flask.

[1] http://www.navy.mil/ah_online/antipiracy/index.html

Flask is much more suited to my ideals (simple libraries over monolithic frameworks) and I started my current project out on Flask - but I ended up going back to Django out of pragmatism. My backend is a fairly simple data store accessed over a REST api, and django-rest-framework solves that use case brilliantly. The recent addition of integrated migrations sealed the deal.

Nice. Flask bias definitely felt as o read. Not sure if you've had to deal with a big Flask code base. I'd choose Django over Flask almost all the time. But I state that without producing evidence of superiority of Django to Flask. So, I guess this post is essentially moot.