If you’re looking to get better performance from your Django apps you can check out Pro Django, PostgreSQL High Performance, or read some my earlier posts on Postgres Performance. All of these are of course good things to do – you can also start by correcting an incredibly common but also painful performance issue, that until 1.6 is unaddressed in Django.

Django’s current default behavior is to establish a connection for each request within a Django application. In many cases any particularly in distributed cloud environments this is a large time sink of your response time. An example application running on Heroku shows a typical connection time of 70ms. A large part of this time is the SSL negotiation that occurs in connecting to your database, which is a good practice to ensure security of your data. Regardless, this is a long time in simply establishing a connection. As a point of comparisson its commonly encourage that most queries to your database are under 10ms.

An example that highlights this in a small lightweight application shows the bulk of a request time being within a connection displayed by New Relic:

For any successful web application there is likely to come a time when you need to conduct some large migration on the backend. I dont mean simple add a column here or add an index there, but rather truly sizeable migrations… Going from MySQL to Postgres or migrating from an older version of Postgres such as a 32 bit instance to a newer 64 bit instance. In these cases the default approach is to just schedule downtime often throwing up a splash screen saying so.

For many sites this approach is simply wrong and lazy, with little effort you can improve the experience and there by ease the burden in conducting these types of migrations. By having the ability to turn your site into a read only mode which Simon Wilson talked about in his post on Lanyrd you can still continue to operate just in a limited capacity. Andrew Godwin further talks about some of this as well in regards to the Lanyrd move and even includes the script they used to migrate data from MySQL to Postgres. Though just in talking with Simon about this a week ago it occurred to me they had not released the code for their read-only mode.

Finally onto the announcing, today I’m releasing django-db-tools. This is currently a very lightweight utility that allows you to flip your site into two modes.

A feature thats glaringly missing within Django and common in many other frameworks including many Java frameworks and Rails is connection pooling for your database connection. As most Django users are Postgres users the default answer is to use something like pgPool or pgBouncer. This are tools that you can run that will persist a connection to your Postgres database intended to offer:

• Connection Pooling
• Replication
• Load Balancing

Its of not that PgBouncer is intended very specifically for pooling while pgPool does much more.

Earlier this week while I was at DjangoCon EU there seemed to be a surprising amount of talk about MongoDB. My problem with this isn’t with MongoDB, but in the assumption that only Mongo can solve what you’re looking for. By and far the most common feature is people want schemaless. It gives them flexibility in their data model and lets them iterate quickly. While I still opt for relational models that map cleanly to a relational database, there are cases where developers may want schemaless. I gave a quick lightning talk on this with slides here, but it is worth recapping.

Update the talk for this is now viewable on YouTube here

When I first came across Django I was an immediate fan. It featured:

• Good documentation
• Steady but stable progress
• Community around apps which encouraged DRY

I’ve been a user off and on depending on my needs for nearly four years since discovering it, and throughout that time all of the above have remained true. However, as I’ve worked on and encountered more complex applications there’s one thing that has time and again broke down for me, which is the Django apps model. It hasn’t broken down due to Django only though, I’ve seen it break down in Ruby (Rails), Java, .Net, take you’re pick of language or framework.

Heroku’s latest Cedar stack supports running anything. Heroku’s officially supported languages actually have their buildpacks public via Heroku’s github, you can view several of them at:

• Python Build Pack
• Ruby Build Pack
• Scala Build Pack

There have even been some created as fun weekend hacks such as the NES Rom Buildpack.

Recently at Heroku my teams have started exploring new forms of collaborating and documenting. In particular editing a wiki for communication is contrary to our regular workflow. Much of our day is spent in code and git. To edit a wiki within a web browser and using some markup we’re less familiar with is an overhead we were aiming to reduce. As a result we’ve tried a few things, the first was simply using a github repo to edit markdown.

For those completely new to web development, Django is a web framework that makes it easier to build web applications with Python. For those that have some knowledge of other web frameworks and Django you may be able to fly through much of the following. Django is a slight modification on the MVC construct which views itself as a MVT Model, View, Template. Django views a website as a project and within it smaller apps are contained.

I’ve been writing applications off and on for nearly 4 years now, since before Django 1.0 was even released. I must say the framework could not be better described than by its own tagline “The Web framework for perfectionists with deadlines”. Among the things I love about it are:

In a couple of various places I’ve seen light requests of how to put autocomplete in for a Django web application. Here’s a really light weight version with a view and autocomplete functionality using:

from django.utils import simplejson
def autocompleteModel(request):
    search_qs = ModelName.objects.filter(name__startswith=request.REQUEST['search'])
    results = []
    for r in search_qs:
        results.append(r.name)
    resp = request.REQUEST['callback'] + '(' + simplejson.dumps(result) + ');'
    return HttpResponse(resp, content_type='application/json')

For the jQuery autocomplete and call: