First of all kudos to Andriy, He created an excellent testing code, he was very responsive, and he really took the time to understand some of the web2py code. Moreover he is the author of the excellent wheezy.web framework.
He just emailed me that he has rebuilt his testing environment and has updated the benchmarks: http://mindref.blogspot.com/2012/09/python-fastest-web-framework.html The memory leak is gone! I am not sure about the cause but I suspect he had an older web2py version installed via pip that was creating problems. We still score last but the numbers are closer to the numbers that Niphlod got. Anyway, this is not a concern to me because although this is a simple "hello world" test, web2py does more than the others (session, T, url and ip validation, etc.) and it is expected to be slower. The difference, as Niphlod sasys, washes away in real life applications. Yet we can probably do better with some simple tweaks and we should pursue that. Niphlod numbers still look better by almost a factor 2 so something else is going on too. Andriy also posted template benchmarks: http://mindref.blogspot.com/2012/07/python-fastest-template.html So if we compare web2py with Django you see that web2py is slower on "hello world" but has faster templates. As you can see the time to render one template page dominates the time to serve "hello world". Of course wheezy.web smokes everybody else on both tests and that is something we should try understand. We should also try port gluino to wheezy.web. Massimo --