[rtpg]

Regarding the slowness, I think it's super important when working with slow stuff like Django to have good SLOs in your head.

"Home page should load under 2 seconds at P95", "reports should load under 10 seconds at P99", "this background task should take under 30 seconds at P99".

Having these targets (and, frankly, remembering in the B2B space is that the status quo is _so slow_) can let you set performance objectives without chasing milliseconds that you don't need to.

Django has a lot of intrinsic slowness to it, "easy" DB access patterns often lead to heavy messes, but if at the end of the day most customers are getting served under some benchmark you can reap the advantages of the tooling without sweating perf too much.

And when you set these SLOs, you can then push for even tighter ones as you figure out your problem space!

In the B2B space companies get away with _so much_ sluggish behavior, if you're better than the median that's already improving things.

[danpalmer]

My previous company had a sizeable Django monolith and did e-commerce stuff which is fairly latency sensitive. Used well, Django was perfectly capable of hitting 150ms per page which was fine for us. Some optimised pages were under 100ms.

Things we did: careful about N+1 queries, caching where obvious, API calls/emails/etc running in background queues.

Things we didn’t do: use a fast templating language (we used Django’s built in one and it was often our bottleneck), removing all database queries (we just had Postgres <2ms latency away), renormalising data (we were highly relational for most things).

Django is perfectly performant enough for almost all use cases, and insanely fast to develop with.

[rtpg]

Yeah you can make Django go really fast, especially when you have pages that well scope what data they are pulling from (though you seem to know it better than me).

I think B2B SaaS, for "normal" teams (read: people not that adept at building scalable systems), when not careful, tend to make omnipages where about 20 different things are happening. Even just navigating to a page ends up triggering random side effects (driven by various needs).

There you can easily find yourself in a performance pit that you have to dig yourself out of (often redesigning features in the process to remove some stuff).

I just find that setting fairly easy performance goals can help to make perf seem more tractable.