The scope of backend performance improvements covers your entire server-side web stack, including database queries, template rendering, caching, and background jobs. You will want to extract the highest performance from them since it is entirely within your control.

For quick and easy profiling needs, django-debug-toolbar is quite handy. We can also use Python profiling tools, such as the hotshot module for detailed analysis. In Django, you can use one of the several profiling middleware snippets to display the output of hotshot in the browser.

A recent live-profiling solution is django-silk. It stores all the requests and responses in the configured database, allowing aggregated analysis over an entire user session, say, to find the worst-performing views. It can also profile any piece of Python code by adding a decorator.

As before, we will take a look at some of the ways to improve backend performance. However, considering that they are vast topics in themselves, they have been grouped into sections. Many of these have already been covered in the previous chapters but have been summarized here for easy reference.