Why use nginx to deploy tornado instead of its built-in server?

Question

I found out that we can run the tornado application from just firing something like python main.py. But everyone else says to deploy tornado with nginx. What are the benefits? I know it's a bit foolish, but I really am confused.

Answer 1

See the notes on Nginx in the Tornado docs:

http://tornado.readthedocs.org/en/stable/guide/running.html

Since one Tornado process can only take advantage of one CPU core (Edit: See updated docs for a development on this), use Nginx to load-balance multiple Tornado processes to use multiple cores Additionally, Nginx is likely a more efficient static file handler than Tornado.