Profiling Django

For profiling data access (which is where the bottleneck is most of the time) check out django-live-profiler. Unlike Django Debug Toolbar it collects data across all requests simultaneously and you can run it in production without too much performance overhead or exposing your app internals.

Just type "django-profiling" on google, you'll get these links (and more):

http://code.djangoproject.com/wiki/ProfilingDjango

http://code.google.com/p/django-profiling/

http://www.rkblog.rk.edu.pl/w/p/django-profiling-hotshot-and-kcachegrind/

Personally I'm using the middleware approach - i.e. each user can toggle a "profiling" flag stored in a session, and if my profiling middleware notices that a flag has been set, it uses Python's hotshot module like this:

def process_view(self, request, view_func, view_args, view_kwargs):

     # setup things here, along with: settings.DEBUG=True 
     # to get a SQL dump in connection.queries

     profiler = hotshot.Profile(fname)
     response = profiler.runcall(view_func, request, *view_args, **view_kwargs)
     profiler.close()

     # process results

     return response

EDIT: For profiling SQL queries http://github.com/robhudson/django-debug-toolbar mentioned by Konstantin is a nice thing - but if your queries are really slow (probably because there are hundreds or thousands of them), then you'll be waiting insane amount of time until it gets loaded into a browser - and then it'll be hard to browse due to slowness. Also, django-debug-toolbar is by design unable to give useful insight into the internals of AJAX requests.

EDIT2: django-extensions has a great profiling command built in:

https://github.com/django-extensions/django-extensions/blob/master/docs/runprofileserver.rst

Just do this and voila:

$ mkdir /tmp/my-profile-data
$ ./manage.py runprofileserver --kcachegrind --prof-path=/tmp/my-profile-data

Shameless plug here, but I recently made https://github.com/django-silk/silk for this purpose. It's somewhat similar to django toolbar but with history, code profiling and more fine grained control over everything.

Try the Django Debug Toolbar. It will show you what queries are executed on each page and how much time they take. It's a really useful, powerful and easy to use tool.

Also, read recommendations about Django performance in Database access optimization from the documentation.

And Django performance tips by Jacob Kaplan-Moss.