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This has nothing to do with Python or C. More likely he has a bug in his code.

Python being magnitudes slower than C for networking code has a lot to do with Python, actually. Other smarter people have already explained it better than I can up above.

there's a userland stack written in C in honeyd. http://honeyd.org/ (slow to respond) and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honeyd

Except that was written for an explicit purpose that wasn't speed. I fail to see how my suggestion of implementing low level networking in C and linking that to python code is considered a poor solution.

I blame all networking issues on the GIL.