⚠️ Warning: This book was published in 2014. Some of the details and code samples may be outdated.

Preface

Thank you for picking up a copy of High Performance Django. When I started Lincoln Loop back in 2007, Django was still a pre-1.0 fringe player in the web framework world. It’s come a long way since then and so has its supporting ecosystem. A lot of bad practices have shaken out and we now have a good blueprint for deploying stable, fast, and scalable Django sites.

The inspiration for this book came from a report I was writing for one of our clients. We were helping a company with a very large Django site (both in lines of code and daily visitors) troubleshoot and diagnose some mysterious scaling issues. Despite having a bright and talented development team, they were missing quite a few quick and easy performance wins. Instead, much of the team’s focus was around building and maintaining complex custom software to keep their site operational. It dawned on me that if an experienced team like this was struggling, what chance did your average developer have?

That night I started working on an outline, and over the next few months, we codified our techniques for building high performance Django sites into this book. After seven years of consulting, we’ve seen and built enough different Django sites to know what works and what doesn’t. As you’ll see, there are no hidden trade secrets. The tools we use are, for the most part, well known and in heavy use on many production Django sites. The thing is, though, there are a lot of pieces you need to put in place and one wrong decision can make life very difficult. You can follow all the conference talks and blog posts, but they only give you small windows into how it’s done; nobody really puts together the full picture.

The goal of this book is to give you that blueprint so you can build and deploy high performance Django sites with confidence. We hope you enjoy it.

– Peter Baumgartner, co-author

2014