That's interesting, but #1 seems like a bug in your shared hosting service. 20 seconds for a single request isn't even usable, and an unoptimized Django config

That's interesting, but #1 seems like a bug in your shared hosting service. 20 seconds for a single request isn't even usable, and an unoptimized Django config doesn't start anywhere near that slow. A $5 Linode and stock Django should be able to get you the 500-1000ms. Also, I'm not sure how you're measuring 250 us, but I doubt it's meaningful number, because in practice either of these two numbers will be greater than that: 1) The network latency to send as single packet from the user to your server. This is usually more like 10 ms, or 40x what you're quoting. Great link I saw on lobste.rs -- a website in a SINGLE PACKET: https://github.com/diracdeltas/FastestWebsiteEver https://github.com/diracdeltas/FastestWebsiteEver 2) The time it takes the browser to render the page (e.g. loaded from the memory of a local server). Static HTML might render in 250 microseconds, but I doubt that anything with JavaScript or even CSS will. In other words, I highly doubt you have 250 us end-user latency; it's basically impossible with the web and "normal conditions". You can choose to measure it in some weird way, but it doesn't reflect what your users are experiencing. EDIT: I guess if you throw out the connection time, 250 us possible. But I don't think it's meaningful to throw out the connection time -- you at least have to average it over many requests.