I'm planning to use Python to develop a web application. Anybody has any idea about any accelerator for python? (something like eAccelerator or apc for php) if not, is there any way to cache the pre-compiled python bytecode ? 
Any idea about the performance comparison between python and php (assuming db/network latencies are same)
Thanks in advance.
There's a trick to this.
It's called mod_wsgi.
The essence of it works like this.

For "static" content (.css, .js, images, etc.) put them in a directory so they're served by Apache, without your Python program knowing they were sent.
For "dynamic" content (the main HTML page itself) you use mod_wsgi to fork a "back-end" process that runs outside of Apache.  

This is faster than PHP because now several things are going on at once.  Apache has dispatched the request to a backend process and then moved on to handle the next request while the backend is still running the first one.
Also, when you've sent your HTML page, the follow-on requests are handled by Apache without your Python program knowing or caring what's going on.  This leads to huge speedups.  Nothing to do with the speed of Python.  Everything to do with the overall architecture.
Python accelerator