Magnum is a pure python HTTP server that is fast and efficient with resources. It is ideal for serving dynamic python-generated pages.

Features:

• Written in pure python
• Elegant, extensible and customizable
• No connectors needed to serve python web applications such as Django
• Event-driven non-blocking socket I/O (epoll for Linux, kqueue for BSD)
• Can handle many simultaneous keep-alive connections to minimize latency
• Works well with slow clients
• Much faster than apache prefork and worker models
• Multi-process queue-based worker pool
• Shuns the one-thread-per-request paradigm to ensure system resources are available
• Uses python 2.6's multiprocessing features to divide up labor and manage resources efficiently
• Minimal collateral damage when under heavy load
• Shared memory pool
• Great for maintaining large per-machine in-memory caches to improve performance
• Supports WSGI and static file serving out of the box
• Simple config.py file supporting per-path/host/port virtual hosts

Requirements:

• Linux/BSD variant (OSX works)
• Python 2.6+ (3.0 is untested)

1.0 Roadmap:

• Zero-downtime updates (no restart needed for changes to the app code layer)
• Reliability and security improvements
• Standard security audits
• Automatic chroot'ing
• Security ideas from OKWS
• Test suites and benchmarks
• Faster serving of static files (using sendfile system call where available)
• HTTPS support
• Basic and Digest authentication out of the box
• Support gzip / deflate
• Built-in rate limiting module
• HTML GUI admin interface

Acknowledgements:

• epoll socket programming examples
• python daemon example code