I'm curious as to why the author hasn't referenced nginx, which is written also event based (epoll/kqueue) and written in C.
Nginx is not tornado in c. Its not about complex custom logic, its about rules redirects and caching.
http://trac.nginx.org/nginx/browser/nginx/trunk/src/http/ngx...
if buf[i:i+4] == "POST":
the JIT automatically turns that into a MOVL + CMP + JMP. The magic of high level languages :)