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 abo

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/ 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/ 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 completely untested other than that it doesn't cause a compilation error in my test setting.