Question

Most of the longest (most time-consuming) logic I’ve encountered basically involves two things: sending email and committing items to the database.

Is there any kind of built-in mechanism for doing these things asynchronously so as not to slow down page load?

Validation should be handled synchronously, but it really seems that the most performant way to email and write to the database should be asynchronously.

For example, let’s say that I want to track pageviews. Thus, every time I get a view, I do:

pv = PageView.objects.get(page = request.path)
pv.views = pv.views + 1
pv.save() # SLOWWWWWWWWWWWWWW

Is it natural to think that I should speed this up by making the whole process asynchronous?

Answer 1

Take a look at Celery. It gives you asynchronous workers to offload tasks exactly like you’re asking about: sending e-mails, counting page views, etc. It was originally designed to work only with Django, but now works in other environments too.