Judging python's speed by how fast websites go is not going to work very well. There are many things that can bog down the "speed" of loading a web site, especially if you are judging speed by how long a page takes to load. torontolife.com is loading extremely slow for me also. So is wikipedia. Much slower than say, code.google.com, or the trac site I have running on my remote server. I have seen just as many slow php sites as slow python sites.
Also, the hosting solution plays a huge part in how fast a site responds. If someone is using python through cgi, that IS going to be very slow, whereas other solutions are faster. PHP sites are not hosted on cgi, while many python solutions sadly still are. So yeah, finding specific sites that are slow and written in python and claiming that it's slow is trolling. Youtube is slow these days, but a year or more ago it was very fast. They just haven't been able to keep up with demand. (Even movies play slow, constantly buffering, and the movies don't even play from python). Of all domains, the web domain needs speed (from logic code, where python resides) the LEAST, because so much of the time is spent buffering packets, alternating between threads or processes, or accessing the database or files. All of these operations contribute the most to slow web pages. And before you complain that python has to "buffer packets", or "access the database", all of these operations are done at the C level (or lower). Python is slow, but php is slower. And python's speed is always improving. On the other hand, it is much easier to find good php hosting services, due to it's wide availability - better hosting = faster sites.
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