My team spent a quarter trying to write a high-performance python web service. We investigated academic papers, evaluated open source solutions and then conducted bare metal tests to verify our findings.

Turns out the lookup is a dictionary in raw Python is two order magnitudes slower than an equivalent hashmap lookup in Java.

Once the numbers came in, we realized we had to choose the right language for the job.

Python is great but it's not the end-all, be-all.