Tornado website running on a Windows production environment

Question

From Tornado's homepage: "Tornado will also run on Windows, although this configuration is not officially supported and is recommended only for development use."

What are the actual drawbacks of doing this? What will break?

Let's say I want a basic small scale webpage with only a few users, something like their blog demo with mysql and authentication. Using Python 3.3.

Answer 1

The main known drawback is that Tornado on Windows uses select() instead of IOCP, which means it has a relatively low limit on the number of connections it supports (a few hundred I think). There may be other drawbacks as well, but they're not well known or documented because the Tornado team has only done minimal testing on windows. If you have problems on windows you'll probably be on your own trying to figure out what's going on.