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 a

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 or another process monitor to make sure the lights stay on. [1] https://github.com/robhudson/django-debug-toolbar https://github.com/robhudson/django-debug-toolbar [2] http://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/ref/models/querysets http://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/ref/models/querysets