[jeroenhd]

This has nothing to do with websockets and much more with doing hashing and Python-to-native calls. It's comparing generating base64(sha1(something)) in Python which I suppose also means "websocket keys".

I'm not sure why the author implemented SHA1 and a base64 digest thereof manually rather than including a small library, but perhaps that was part of the challenge.

Python can generate a whole lot more keys per second if you enable SIMD, multithreading, or even GPU support. In fact, Ryzen / 11th+ Gen Intel/ARMv8A have dedicated SHA1 instructions that should significantly boost performance here. Together with something like https://github.com/WojciechMula/base64-avx512 I bet you could increase the performance an order of magnitude if daw CPU speed were really a concern.

I suppose three million keys per second ought to be enough for any websocket server, especially for a relatively simple implementation of the code.