Tornado is a Python web framework built from the ground up for asynchronous I/O, enabling thousands of concurrent connections with minimal hardware. It's optimized for long-polling, WebSockets, and real-time applications where traditional sync frameworks (Flask, Django) would require one thread per connection. Tornado uses Python's asyncio event loop to handle I/O-bound work asynchronously. A single Tornado instance can manage thousands of concurrent WebSocket connections, making it ideal for chat, live notifications, multiplayer games, and dashboards.