[bshipp]

django-debug-toolbar is excellent, and I use it on my django sites as well.

In addition, the documentation does a pretty good job of highlighting some of the common gotchas. Unlike your environment, my page/js weight is very low but I'm querying against a few hundred million records joined across many tables. Even using materialized views to eliminate the impact of joins in postgres, it's required a fairly delicate touch to make the delay for page loads tolerable.

In that respect I would likely redo the project in flask and sqlalchemy, if only because then I wouldn't have to remember the syntax nuances of two separate ORMs. They're similar, but not identical, and it's infuriating at times. Plus I'm very comfortable dipping down into raw SQL in sqlalchemy, and it hasn't been as intuitive for me with Django.