Performance is a feature. Studies show how slow sites have an adverse effect on users, and therefore revenue. For instance, tests at Amazon in 2007 revealed that for every 100 ms increase in load time of amazon.com, the sales decreased by 1 percent.

Reassuringly, several high-performance web applications such as Disqus and Instagram have been built on Django. At Disqus, in 2013, they could handle 1.5 million concurrently connected users, 45,000 new connections per second, 165,000 messages per second, with less than 0.2 seconds latency end-to-end.

The key to improving performance is finding where the bottlenecks are. Rather than relying on guesswork, it is always recommended that you measure and profile your application to identify these performance bottlenecks. As Lord Kelvin would say:

In most web applications, the bottlenecks are likely to be at the browser or the database end rather than within Django. However, to the user, the entire application needs to be responsive.

Let's take a look at some of the ways to improve the performance of a Django application. Due to widely differing techniques, the tips are split into two parts: frontend and backend.