So, in order to avoid the "no one best answer" problem, I'm going to ask, not for the best way, but the standard or most common way to handle sessions when using the Tornado framework. That is, if we're not using 3rd party authentication (OAuth, etc.), but rather we have want to have our own Users table with secure cookies in the browser but most of the session info stored on the server, what is the most common way of doing this? I have seen some people using Redis, some people using their normal database (MySQL or Postgres or whatever), some people using memcached.
The application I'm working on won't have millions of users at a time, or probably even thousands. It will need to eventually get some moderately complex authorization scheme, though. What I'm looking for is to make sure we don't do something "weird" that goes down a different path than the general Tornado community, since authentication and authorization, while it is something we need, isn't something that is at the core of our product and so isn't where we should be differentiating ourselves. So, we're looking for what most people (who use Tornado) are doing in this respect, hence I think it's a question with (in theory) an objectively true answer.
The ideal answer would point to example code, of course.
Tornado designed to be stateless and don't have session support out of the box.
Use secure cookies to store sensitive information like user_id. Use standard cookies to store not critical information.
For storing large objects - use standard scheme - MySQL + memcache.