Python web hosting: Why are server restarts necessary?

Question

We currently run a small shared hosting service for a couple of hundred small PHP sites on our servers. We\'d like to offer Python support too, but from our initial researc

Answer 1

Python is a compiled language; the compiled byte code is cached by the Python process for later use, to improve performance. PHP, by default, is interpreted. It's a tradeoff between usability and speed.

If you're using a standard WSGI module, such as Apache's mod_wsgi, then you don't have to restart the server -- just touch the .wsgi file and the code will be reloaded. If you're using some weird server which doesn't support WSGI, you're sort of on your own usability-wise.