Tornado 是 FriendFeed 使用的可扩展的非阻塞式 web 服务器及其相关工具的开源版本。这个 Web 框架看起来有些像 web.py 或者 Google 的 webapp，不过为了能有效利用非阻塞式服务器环境，这个 Web 框架还包含了一些相关的有用工具 和优化。
Tornado 和现在的主流 Web 服务器框架（包括大多数 Python 的框架）有着明显的区别：它是非阻塞式服务器，而且速度相当快。得利于其 非阻塞的方式和对 epoll 的运用，Tornado 每秒可以处理数以千计的连接，这意味着对于实时 Web 服务来说，Tornado 是一个理想的 Web 框架。我们开发这个 Web 服务器的主要目的就是为了处理 FriendFeed 的实时功能 ——在 FriendFeed 的应用里每一个活动用户都会保持着一个服务器连接。
Tornado is a Python web framework and asynchronous networking library, originally developed at FriendFeed. By using non-blocking network I/O, Tornado can scale to tens of thousands of open connections, making it ideal for long polling, WebSockets, and other applications that require a long-lived connection to each user.
主要模块
web - FriendFeed 使用的基础 Web 框架，包含了 Tornado 的大多数重要的功能
escape - XHTML, JSON, URL 的编码/解码方法
database - 对 MySQLdb 的简单封装，使其更容易使用
template - 基于 Python 的 web 模板系统
httpclient - 非阻塞式 HTTP 客户端，它被设计用来和 web 及 httpserver 协同工作
auth - 第三方认证的实现（包括 Google OpenID/OAuth、Facebook Platform、Yahoo BBAuth、FriendFeed OpenID/OAuth、Twitter OAuth）
locale - 针对本地化和翻译的支持
options - 命令行和配置文件解析工具，针对服务器环境做了优化
底层模块
httpserver - 服务于 web 模块的一个非常简单的 HTTP 服务器的实现
iostream - 对非阻塞式的 socket 的简单封装，以方便常用读写操作
ioloop - 核心的 I/O 循环
Tornado is listed in PyPI and can be installed with pip. Note that the source distribution includes demo applications that are not present when Tornado is installed in this way, so you may wish to download a copy of the source tarball or clone the git repository as well.
Prerequisites: Tornado runs on Python 2.7, and 3.3+ For Python 2, version 2.7.9 or newer is strongly recommended for the improved SSL support. In addition to the requirements which will be installed automatically by pip or setup.py install, the following optional packages may be useful:
concurrent.futures is the recommended thread pool for use with Tornado and enables the use of ThreadedResolver. It is needed only on Python 2; Python 3 includes this package in the standard library.
pycurl is used by the optional tornado.curl_httpclient. Libcurl version 7.22 or higher is required.
Twisted may be used with the classes in tornado.platform.twisted.
pycares is an alternative non-blocking DNS resolver that can be used when threads are not appropriate.
monotonic or Monotime add support for a monotonic clock, which improves reliability in environments where clock adjustements are frequent. No longer needed in Python 3.3.
Platforms: Tornado should run on any Unix-like platform, although for the best performance and scalability only Linux (with epoll) and BSD (with kqueue) are recommended for production deployment (even though Mac OS X is derived from BSD and supports kqueue, its networking performance is generally poor so it is recommended only for development use). Tornado will also run on Windows, although this configuration is not officially supported and is recommended only for development use. Without reworking Tornado IOLoop interface, it’s not possible to add a native Tornado Windows IOLoop implementation or leverage Windows’ IOCP support from frameworks like AsyncIO or Twisted.