There is a server and a webframework. When should we use framework and when can we replace it with other one?
This distinction is a bit blurry. Only if you are serving static pages, you would use one of the fast server like lighthttpd. Other wise, most servers provides a varying complexity of framework to develop web applications. Tornado is a good web framework. Twisted is even more capable and is considered a good networking framework. It has support for lot of protocols.
Tornado and Twisted are frameworks that provide support non-blocking, asynchronous web / networking application development.
When should Tornado be used? When is it useless? When using it, what should be taken into account?
By it's very nature, Async / Non-Blocking I/O works great when it is I/O intensive and not computation intensive. Most web / networking applications suits well for this model. If your application demands certain computational intensive task to be done then it has to be delegated to some other service that can handle it better. While Tornado / Twisted can do the job of web server, responding to web requests.
How can we make inefficient site using Tornado?
- Do any thing computational intensive task
- Introduce blocking operations
But I guess it's not a silver bullet and if we just blindly run Django-based or any other site with Tornado it won't give any performance boost.
Performance is usually a characteristic of complete web application architecture. You can bring down the performance with most web frameworks, if the application is not designed properly. Think about caching, load balancing etc.
Tornado and Twisted provides reasonable performance and is good for building a very performant web application. You can check out the testimonials for both twisted and tornado to see what they are capable of
