Jacob Kaplan-Moss

Tag: Scaling

"Web Scale"

Christophe Pettus:

What does [“web scale”] mean?

It clearly means something along the lines of, “Can handle lots of transactions per unit time,” but how many?

I mean, WordPress with WP-SuperCache is “web scale” if all that is meant is, “Can be used to implement a high volume site,” but I assume those who are touting something as “web scale” are aiming higher than that.

Anyone care to offer a quantitative definition of this term?

October 28th, 2010 • scaling

Django performance tips

Django handles lots of traffic with ease; Django sites have survived slashdottings, farkings, and more. Here are some notes on how we tweak our servers to get that type of high performance.

Use a separate media server

Django deliberately doesn’t serve media for you, and it’s designed that way to save you from yourself. If you try to serve media from the same Apache instance that’s serving Django, you’re going to absolutely kill performance. Apache reuses processes between each request, so once a process caches all the code and libraries for Django, those stick around in memory. If you aren’t using that process to service a Django request, all the memory overhead is wasted.

December 12th, 2005 • django performance scaling