django-debug-toolbar

With Django - or any ORM it's a good idea to keep an eye on the SQL that your application is running. Use the django debug toolbar[1] and run your SQL queries against a profiler. Most of the time, that's where your serious bottlenecks will be. If a query happens to be a bottleneck, there are ways the ORM can improve performance (e.g. select_related() to reduce the number of queries in a loop, only() and defer() to reduce the number of columns in a query, and so on[2]. In some cases this may even involve using pure SQL or caching heavily used queries. Look at using processes vs threads with mod_wsgi, which should help improve performance. Ultimately however you might find nginx a better option, particularly if you are using it for static media/load balancing anyway. I'd suggest uwsgi (also heard good things about gunicorn). Use supervisord

http://github.com/robhudson/django-debug-toolbar This is an invaluable resource for benchmarking performance, both CPU and database and will help you optimize your queries through the ORM.

Can you name a single startup that failed because of their inability to scale? Development speed is way more important than scalability. Like Paul Graham says, the vast majority of startups fail because they make a product no one wants or because they never launch a product in the first place. Faster software development means you figure out if your product is a dud faster, and you're less likely to run out of morale before you've got something substantial. I've been working on my current (unreleased) project with Django and jQuery on Linux for about a month. Here's all of the stuff I've made use of from the Django, jQuery, and Python communities: http://code.google.com/p/django-command-extensions/ http://south.aeracode.org/ http://github.com/dcramer/django-ratings http://github.com/pydanny/django-uni-form http://github.com/robhudson/d

The first thing you want to do is measure the problem in enough detail to identify the cause. I can recommend Rob's Debug Toolbar (though with reservations about the possible overhead, though I'd have been happy to chance that when I needed to instrument an underperforming site): http://github.com/robhudson/django-debug-toolbar/ though his tree doesn't have the injectable measurement points I've added to the timer panel yet. I hesitate to suggest this for a production setting only because it's not had much third party exposure (or if it has no one's let me know), but "it works for me": http://github.com/mmaney/django-debug-toolbar/ You might want to avoid the most recent commit (so use da1429...) - Rob had asked about adding support for the cache API's "add" method, and I threw that together based on the spec; that one part is completel