This is an *import* on github of the activestate recipe:
http://code.activestate.com/recipes/440665/, with the permission of the author,
Josiah Carlson.

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Original pseudo-async* version by Pierre Quentel, available from
    http://aspn.activestate.com/ASPN/Cookbook/Python/Recipe/259148

* It would only be async while reading requests, it would switch to a
synchronous write to a socket when writing a response to a socket.  Ick.


Features this version offers:
1. Uses asynchronous reading and writing to/from sockets all the time.
2. Performs sectioned reads from on-disk files, allowing for serving files of
   unlimited size.
3. More informative logging.
4. A quick wrapper for logging to a file and stdout/stderr.
5. Trailing-slash redirects on directories.
6. Optional built-in favicon.ico (to reduce the number of spurious log
   entries).
7. Subclass which does not allow any directory lists or redirecting to
   /index.htm[l] .
8. Subclass which does not allow any directory lists, but does automatic
   redirection to /index.htm[l] .
9. Doesn't try to open reserved names on Windows.
10. Has a tuning mechanism to change buffer performance depending on small
    or large files.

For most people, one can run this from the command line and get a reasonably
functioning web server with minor issue.

I benchmarked this version in my personal projects folder, which contains
around a gig of files, sizes ranging from a few kilobytes, to 100 megabytes.
I then performed two concurrent "wget -m http://localhost/" calls (from
different paths) on Windows 2k (machine is a P4 2.8ghz with hyperthreading,
1.5 gigs memory, reading from an 80 gig SATA drive, writing to a 120 gig PATA
drive).

On small files, it was able to serve up 15-30 files/second. On larger (10+
meg) files, it was able to serve up at 15+ megs/second (so says adding the
speed reported by wget). The server never broke 7 megs of resident memory, and
tended to hang below 10% processor utilization.

There exists a live host running this web server: nada.ics.uci.edu