Category Archives: Django

How to Scale Django: Beyond the Basics

Getting Started

You’ve deployed Django to your Droplet and life is good. You bumped into some performance problems as your site’s traffic grew but you’ve found the bottleneck and fixed it. However, your site’s traffic keeps growing. Somehow you need more performance…what can you do?

Let’s dig into the guts of our application and server configuration a little. This article is written on the assumption that you’re using Ubuntu 12.04, but the principles work with any version of Linux.

If you’re using Apache then you should have followed the instructions for optimizing your webserver. If you are using Nginx, these tips will work for you as well. Continue reading How to Scale Django: Beyond the Basics

How To Optimize Apache Web Server Performance

Introduction

Apache is an amazingly powerful and capable web server. In order to make initial setup as easy as possible, it comes with numerous modules pre-installed. This makes it a great choice for new projects when you need to quickly be productive. However, as your site grows you may start to bump into performance problems.

What first attracted me to DigitalOcean was the low cost to get started. The smallest and cheapest droplets have 512MB of RAM, which doesn’t seem like much in today’s world of big frameworks. However, you’d be surprised what you can do with a small server like this if you take a little time to tweak the settings.

If you’re running Apache on one of the smaller sizes of droplets, or if you want to maximize your performance on the bigger droplets, here are a few things you should do. I’ll be using Ubuntu 12.04 in the examples but the principles I’m demonstrating are applicable to other versions of Linux as well. Continue reading How To Optimize Apache Web Server Performance

How To Scale Django: Finding the Bottleneck

Introduction

Django is an excellent Python based platform for building modern web apps. One of its biggest strengths is that it helps developers work faster.

You’ve built your awesome app and deployed it. Things are great, but now that you’re loading it up with larger amounts of data and you’re starting to have several people use it at the same time, it’s not as fast as you’d like.

It’s a common problem. Fortunately, we have some tools to help alleviate the problems.

First, let’s check for a few of the more obvious issues: Continue reading How To Scale Django: Finding the Bottleneck