Gearman     Gearman provides a generic application framework to farm out work to other machines or processes that are better suited to do the work. It allows you to do work in parallel, to load balance processing, and to call functions between languages. It can be used in a variety of applications, from high-availability web sites to the transport of database replication events. In other words, it is the nervous system for how distributed processing communicates. A few strong points about Gearman:     http://gearman.org/     tags: performance gearman mapreduce shedskin - Google Code     Shed Skin is an experimental compiler, that can translate pure, but implicitly statically typed Python programs into optimized C++. It can generate stand-alone programs or (simple, for now) extension modules, that can be imported and used from larger Python programs.     http://code.google.com/p/shedskin/     tags: python performance Amund Tveit's Blog: Tools for Accelerating Python     http://amundblog.blogspot.com/2008/11/tools-for-accelerating...     tags: python performance psyco pyrex