Home/ Questions/Q 146701
In Process

The Archive Base Latest Questions

Editorial Team
  • 0
Asked: 2026-05-11T08:39:01+00:00

I’m playing around with Django on my website hosting service. I found out that

  • 0

I’m playing around with Django on my website hosting service.

I found out that a simple Django page, which has only some static text, and is rendered from a very simple template I created takes a significant time to render. When compared to a static HTML page, I am getting ~2 seconds difference in the load times. Keep in mind this is a simple test of mine with nothing complicated. Also note that my web hosting is on a shared server (not dedicated), so I might be hitting some CPU limitations.

Seems to me that either:

  1. I have some basic CGI/Apache/Django configuration wrong
  2. Django takes significant overhead, at least in this specific scenario.

I find #1 not probable since I followed my web hosting service wiki on how to set up Django. So we are left with the overhead problem.

My question is which web framework do you find the best to use in scenarios where the website is hosted on a shared server, and CPU/memory overhead must be kept to minimum?

Edit: seems that my configuration is something I might want to look at, and perhaps later on I’ll be opening a question on how to best configure Django.

For now, I would appreciate answers focusing on your experience, in general, with web frameworks, and which of those you found to be the best in terms of performance in the aforementioned scenario.

Share

Leave an answer

You must login to add an answer.

Need An Account,

1 Answer

  1. ‘I have some basic CGI/Apache/Django configuration wrong’

    Correct.

    First. The very first time Django returns a page, it takes forever. A lot of initialization happens for the first request.

    Second. What specific configuration are you using. We just switched from mod_python to mod_wsgi in daemon mode and are very happy with the performance changes.

    Third. What database are you using?

    Fourth. What test configuration are you using?

    Fifth. What caching parameters and reverse proxy are you using?

    Odds are good that you have a lot of degrees of freedom in your configuration.

    Edit

    The question ‘which of those you found to be the best in terms of performance’ is largely impossible to answer.

    See http://wiki.python.org/moin/WebFrameworks

    There are dozens of frameworks. Few people can examine more than a few to do head-to-head comparison.

    The best possible performance is achieved through static content. A Python app that makes static pages (for instance a collection of Jinja templates) is fastest.

    After that, it’s largely impossible to say. Even http://werkzeug.pocoo.org/ involves some processing overheads that may be unacceptable in the above scenario. Python can be slow.

    Django, with a modicum of effort, is often fast enough. Serving static content separately from dynamic content, for example, can be a huge speedup.

    Since Django does so much automatically, there’s a huge victory in not having to write every little administrative page.

    • 0