This Python library was evolved at IronPort Systems and has been provided as open source by Cisco Systems under an MIT license.

Intro

Shrapnel is a library for high-performance concurrency. It uses coroutines to implement user threads on top of either kqueue (FreeBSD, OS X) or /dev/epoll (linux), and is written mostly in Pyrex/Cython, supporting both 32-bit and 64-bit platforms. It is the culmination of about 8 years of work at IronPort Systems, a provider of high-speed mail appliances. It was open-sourced by Cisco Systems in late 2011.

Features

• Lightweight threads, event-driven scheduler.
• Underneath: non-blocking operations on descriptors, like sockets and pipes.
• On top, synchronous API for straight-line, simple code.
• Highly scalable - tens or hundreds of thousands of connections/threads.
• Thread synchronization primitives, like mutexes, semaphores, etc...
• Wait on kqueue events like file/directory changes, signals, processes, etc... [kqueue only]
• DNS stub resolver (full-fledged resolver may be forthcoming)
• HTTP server and client
• Support for TLS via tlslite (openssl interface may be forthcoming)
• other protocols/codecs: ldap, asn1, ftp, mysql, postgres, AMQP.
• MIT License.

Tutorial

See http://ironport.github.com/shrapnel/tutorial.html

API Documentation

See http://ironport.github.com/shrapnel/