Django: Optimization and Performance

Uncategorised • 14th Aug, 15

 
 

There are various ways which you can squeeze out all that’s possible when it comes to the performance for your Django powered site by making use of highly effective optimizations.  With increasing traffic comes the option for you to boost your performance as well as keep your site both fast and responsive. With there being an endless amount of things which could be optimized if you are to make use of Django, there are some optimization techniques which could increase this even more. 

  • Common optimizations

The basic optimizations are outlined in the Django documentation, to make things that much easier for you.  Once you’ve read through it and understand it completely, implementing it will be a walk in the park.  The Django debug toolbar will allow you to examine all of your database queries.

  • Caching

There’s no beating Django’s cache framework, which is why there’s no reason that you shouldn’t make use of it.  Once you’ve determined which of the pages are the most often served, focus your concentration primarily on these.  If there are no dynamic parts included you can cache a whole Django view with cache_page

  • Django’s paginator 
 

This is a solution which is easy to use when it comes to handling larger sets of data.  Thanks to this, users will be able to flip through many pages of content.  Forum messages, long lists of blog posts and images, for example, will no longer create issues.  Using sorted querysets with the paginator typically only works well with the first 100 pages, but as the page number increases you’ll find that your database queries will take longer and longer.  Not being optimized for this kind of operation, the higher the page number, the more rows should be ordered.     

  • Template engine

Though it’s both comfortable and mature, Django’s template engine isn’t the fastest out there.  Recommended by the Django development team, Jinja2 is the answer to all of your prayers.  Being fast, simple, and a beautiful template language, it’s based on the syntax of Django.  There’s no losing when making use of this to better the project that you are currently working on, with it being more flexible and faster than Django’s native engine.      

It’s important that you do not optimize prematurely.  It’s best to wait it out until you can see an impact.  Before you go ahead, observe your logs – log database queries that take longer than a specific amount of time in particular.  Although you might think about connecting more servers to your infrastructure, it makes more sense for you to tweak your software until you’re positive that there’s nothing more to gain from it.  If you’ve given any of these a try, let us know about your experience in the comment’s section below!    

 

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