One thing I'd also recommend for speeding up django is swapping in djinja. Straight drop in replacement for almost the entire template engine, but much faster.
Benchmarks, please. I've yet to find a case where that was true in a real-world project outside of … dubious … designs where someone was using a dozen nested if/for blocks to avoid writing a templatetag.
In one memorable case, someone switched an entire site over to Jinja before doing any profiling – I reverted it and added select_related() to avoid doing 8,000 queries while generating the page.
https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/ref/templates/api/#dja...