Our SMTP frontend crashed and restarted three times this week, twice onWednesday around 6pm and the third time today at 3:16pm, so some of ourstats are really fragmentary. Still, this week we:

• got 15,036 messages from 272 different IP addresses.
• handled 20,984 sessions from 1,243 different IP addresses.
• received 114,833 connections from at least 33,061 different IPaddresses up

One of the small paradoxes of the web is that it is often theconnections with the least bandwidth that put the largest load on yourweb server.

This is because each connection consumes a certain amount of serverresources, ranging from kernel data structures for socket buffers up toan entire thread or process on a dynamic website. The slower someone'sconnection, the longer they tie up up this stuff on your end as youslowly feed them data. Conversely, people on fast connections get in,get their data,

As part of a longer entry, Muharem Hrnjadovic asks :

I would love to see examples or code snippets that are made possibleand/or improved greatly by leveraging functools.partial() .

I'm not sure that my example qualifies, but I'll take a shot at it.

DWiki has a WSGI-like processing pipeline to handlerequests; they get passed from function to function, possibly gettingmutated on the way down and possibly having the results mutated on theway back up.

The pipeline functions look