LOLapps makes use of Paster, Tornado, SQLAlchemy and others to serve 50 million Facebook users a month. Here are their slides from their PyCon2010 talk on the methods they used to boost performance of their gaming servers.

Didn’t make it to PyCon? Watch some of the presentations here.

MongoDB lacks Unix domain socket support. Using a file socket rather than a TCP socket results in better performance. “Running the same benchmarks gives [a] time of 35.8s, vs 43.9s over TCP, and 28.9s with the RAM cache vs 31.1s on TCP.” Here’s a patch implementing domain sockets for MongoDB.

A nice HOWTO on importing an existing Git repository into a fresh SVN repository, complete with history. The commit dates will be off, but you knew that anyway.

“At the Olympics, the blink of an eye can be all that separates the gold medalist from the 10th-place finisher. In some events, this is obvious. But in others, with athletes racing one by one, the closeness of the race is harder to perceive. Listen to the differences below.”