Does Django scale

Question

I m building a web application with Django  The reasons I chose Django were    I wanted to work with free open-source tools  I like Python and feel it s a long-term language  whereas regarding Ruby I wasn t sure  and PHP seemed like a huge hassle to learn  I m building a prototype for an idea and wasn t thinking too much about the future  Development speed was the main factor  and I already knew Python  I knew the migration to Google App Engine would be easier should I choose to do so in the future  I heard Django was  nice     Now that I m getting closer to thinking about publishing my work  I start being concerned about scale  The only information I found about the scaling capabilities of Django is provided by the Django team  I m not saying anything to disregard them  but this is clearly not objective information       My questions    What s the  largest  site that s built on Django today   I measure size mostly by user traffic  Can Django deal with 100 000 users daily  each visiting the site for a couple of hours  Could a site like Stack Overflow run on Django

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Spreading the tasks evenly  in short optimizing each and every aspect including DBs  Files  Images  CSS etc  and balancing the load with several other resources is necessary once your site application starts growing  OR you make some more space for it to grow  Implementation of latest technologies like CDN  Cloud are must with huge sites  Just developing and tweaking an application won t give your the cent percent satisfation  other components also play an important role

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If you have a site with some static content  then putting a Varnish server in front will dramatically increase your performance  Even a single box can then easily spit out 100 Mbit s of traffic   Note that with dynamic content  using something like Varnish becomes a lot more tricky

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As stated in High Performance   Django Book  and Go through this Cal Henderson   See further details as mentioned below   It   s not uncommon to hear people say    Django doesn   t scale     Depending on how you look at it  the statement is either completely true or patently false  Django  on its own  doesn   t scale   The same can be said of Ruby on Rails  Flask  PHP  or any other language used by a database-driven dynamic website   The good news  however  is that Django interacts beautifully with a suite of caching and load balancing tools that will allow it to scale to as much traffic as you can throw at it   Contrary to what you may have read online   it can do so without replacing core components often labeled as    too slow    such as the database ORM or the template layer   Disqus serves over 8 billion page views per month  Those are some huge numbers    These teams have proven Django most certainly does scale   Our experience here at Lincoln Loop backs it up   We   ve built big Django sites capable of spending the day on the Reddit homepage without breaking a sweat   Django   s scaling success stories are almost too numerous to list at this point   It backs Disqus  Instagram  and Pinterest  Want some more proof  Instagram was able to sustain over 30 million users on Django with only 3 engineers  2 of which had no back-end development

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Here s a list of some relatively high-profile things built in Django    The Guardian s  Investigate your MP s expenses  app Politifact com  here s a Blog post talking about the  positive  experience  Site won a Pulitzer  NY Times  Represent app EveryBlock Peter Harkins  one of the programmers over at WaPo  lists all the stuff they   ve built with Django on his blog It s a little old  but someone from the LA Times gave a basic overview of why they went with Django  The Onion s AV Club was recently moved from  I think Drupal  to Django    I imagine a number of these these sites probably gets well over 100k  hits per day  Django can certainly do 100k hits day and more  But YMMV in getting your particular site there depending on what you re building   There are caching options at the Django level  for example caching querysets and views in memcached can work wonders  and beyond  upstream caches like Squid   Database Server specifications will also be a factor  and usually the place to splurge   as is how well you ve tuned it  Don t assume  for example  that Django s going set up indexes properly  Don t assume that the default PostgreSQL or MySQL configuration is the right one   Furthermore  you always have the option of having multiple application servers running Django if that is the slow point  with a software or hardware load balancer in front   Finally  are you serving static content on the same server as Django  Are you using Apache or something like nginx or lighttpd  Can you afford to use a CDN for static content  These are things to think about  but it s all very speculative  100k hits day isn t the only variable  how much do you want to spend  How much expertise do you have managing all these components  How much time do you have to pull it all together

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If you want to use Open source then there are many options for you  But python is best among them as it has many libraries and a super awesome community  These are a few reasons which might change your mind    Python is very good but it is a interpreted language which makes it slow  But many accelerator and caching services are there which partly solve this problem  If you are thinking about rapid development then Ruby on Rails is best among all  The main motto of this ROR  framework is to give a comfortable experience to the developers  If you compare Ruby and Python both have nearly the same syntax  Google App Engine is very good service but it will bind you in its scope  you don t get chance to experiment new things  Instead of it you can use Digital Ocean cloud which will only take  5 Month charge for its simplest droplet  Heroku is another free service where you can deploy your product  Yes  Yes  What you heard is totally correct but here are some examples which are using other technologies   Rails  Github  Twitter previously   Shopify  Airbnb  Slideshare  Heroku etc  PHP  Facebook  Wikipedia  Flickr  Yahoo  Tumbler  Mailchimp etc     Conclusion is a framework or language won t do everything for you  A better architecture  designing and strategy will give you a scalable website  Instagram is the biggest example  this small team is managing such huge data  Here is one blog about its architecture must read it

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I m sure you re looking for a more solid answer  but the most obvious objective validation I can think of is that Google pushes Django for use with its App Engine framework  If anybody knows about and deals with scalability on a regular basis  it s Google  From what I ve read  the most limiting factor seems to be the database back-end  which is why Google uses their own

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My experience with Django is minimal but I do remember in The Django Book they have a chapter where they interview people running some of the larger Django applications   Here is a link   I guess it could provide some insights   It says curse com is one of the largest Django applications with around 60-90 million page views in a month

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I was at the EuroDjangoCon conference the other week  and this was the subject of a couple of talks - including from the founders of what was the largest Django-based site  Pownce  slides from one talk here   The main message is that it s not Django you have to worry about  but things like proper caching  load balancing  database optimisation  etc   Django actually has hooks for most of those things - caching  in particular  is made very easy

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The problem is not to know if django can scale or not    The right way is to understand and know which are the network design patterns and tools to put under your django symfony rails project to scale well   Some ideas can be     Multiplexing  Inversed proxy  Ex   Nginx  Varnish Memcache Session  Ex   Redis Clusterization on your project and db for load balancing and fault tolerance   Ex   Docker Use third party to store assets  Ex   Amazon S3   Hope it help a bit  This is my tiny rock to the mountain

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Even-though there have been a lot of great answers here  I just feel like pointing out  that nobody have put emphasis on    It depends on the application   If you application is light on writes  as in you are reading a lot more data from the DB than you are writing  Then scaling django should be fairly trivial  heck  it comes with some fairly decent output view caching straight out of the box  Make use of that  and say  redis as a cache provider  put a load balancer in front of it  spin up n-instances and you should be able to deal with a VERY large amount of traffic   Now  if you have to do thousands of complex writes a second  Different story  Is Django going to be a bad choice  Well  not necessarily  depends on how you architect your solution really  and also  what your requirements are   Just my two cents  -

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Scaling Web apps is not about web frameworks or languages  is about your architecture  It s about how you handle you browser cache  your database cache  how you use non-standard persistence providers  like CouchDB   how tuned is your database and a lot of other stuff

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What s the  largest  site that s built on Django today   I measure size mostly by user traffic    In the US  it was Mahalo  I m told they handle roughly 10 million uniques a month  Now  in 2019  Mahalo is powered by Ruby on Rails   Abroad  the Globo network  a network of news  sports  and entertainment sites in Brazil   Alexa ranks them in to top 100 globally  around 80th currently    Other notable Django users include PBS  National Geographic  Discovery  NASA  actually a number of different divisions within NASA   and the Library of Congress      Can Django deal with 100k users daily  each visiting the site for a couple of hours    Yes -- but only if you ve written your application right  and if you ve got enough hardware  Django s not a magic bullet      Could a site like StackOverflow run on Django    Yes  but see above    Technology-wise  easily  see soclone for one attempt  Traffic-wise  compete pegs StackOverflow at under 1 million uniques per month  I can name at least dozen Django sites with more traffic than SO

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Another example is rasp yandex ru  Russian transport timetable service  Its attendance satisfies your requirements

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Yes it can  It could be Django with Python or Ruby on Rails  It will still scale    There are few different techniques  First  caching is not scaling  You could have several application servers balanced with nginx as the front in addition to hardware balancer s   To scale on the database side you can go pretty far with read slave in MySQL   PostgreSQL if you go the RDBMS way   Some good examples of heavy traffic websites in Django could be    Pownce when they were still there  Discus  generic shared comments manager  All the newspaper related websites  Washington Post and others    You can feel safe

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Check out this micro news aggregator called EveryBlock   It s entirely written in Django  In fact they are the people who developed the Django  framework itself

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Note that if you re expecting 100K users per day  that are active for hours at a time  meaning max of 20K  concurrent users   you re going to need A LOT of servers   SO has  15 000 registered users  and most of them are probably not active daily   While the bulk of traffic comes from unregistered users  I m guessing that very few of them stay on the site more than a couple minutes  i e  they follow google search results then leave      For that volume  expect at least 30 servers     which is still a rather heavy 1 000 concurrent users per server

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Today we use many web apps and sites for our needs  Most of them are highly useful  I will show you some of them used by python or django   Washington Post  The Washington Post   s website is a hugely popular online news source to accompany their daily paper  Its    huge amount of views and traffic can be easily handled by the Django web framework  Washington Post - 52 2 million unique visitors  March  2015   NASA  The National Aeronautics and Space Administration   s official website is the place to find news  pictures  and videos about their ongoing space exploration  This Django website can easily handle huge amounts of views and traffic  2 million visitors monthly  The Guardian  The Guardian is a British news and media website owned by the Guardian Media Group  It contains nearly all of the content of the newspapers The Guardian and The Observer  This huge data is handled by Django  The Guardian  commenting system  - 41 6 million unique visitors  October  2014   YouTube  We all know YouTube as the place to upload cat videos and fails  As one of the most popular websites in existence  it provides us with endless hours of video entertainment  The Python programming language powers it and the features we love   DropBox  DropBox started the online document storing revolution that has become part of daily life  We now store almost everything in the cloud  Dropbox allows us to store  sync  and share almost anything using the power of Python   Survey Monkey  Survey Monkey is the largest online survey company  They can handle over one million responses every day on their rewritten Python website   Quora  Quora is the number one place online to ask a question and receive answers from a community of individuals  On their Python website relevant results are answered  edited  and organized by these community members   Bitly  A majority of the code for Bitly URL shortening services and analytics are all built with Python  Their service can handle hundreds of millions of events per day   Reddit  Reddit is known as the front page of the internet  It is the place online to find information or entertainment based on thousands of different categories  Posts and links are user generated and are promoted to the top through votes  Many of Reddit   s capabilities rely on Python for their functionality   Hipmunk  Hipmunk is an online consumer travel site that compares the top travel sites to find you the best deals  This Python website   s tools allow you to find the cheapest hotels and flights for your destination   Click here for more   25-of-the-most-popular-python-and-django-websites   What-are-some-well-known-sites-running-on-Django

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The largest django site I know of is the Washington Post  which would certainly indicate that it can scale well   Good design decisions probably have a bigger performance impact than anything else  Twitter is often cited as a site which embodies the performance issues with another dynamic interpreted language based web framework  Ruby on Rails - yet Twitter engineers have stated that the framework isn t as much an issue as some of the database design choices they made early on    Django works very nicely with memcached and provides some classes for managing the cache  which is where you would resolve the majority of your performance issues  What you deliver on the wire is almost more important than your backend in reality - using a tool like yslow is critical for a high performance web application  You can always throw more hardware at your backend  but you can t change your users bandwidth

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We re doing load testing now   We think we can support 240 concurrent requests  a sustained rate of 120 hits per second 24x7  without any significant degradation in the server performance   That would be 432 000 hits per hour   Response times aren t small  our transactions are large  but there s no degradation from our baseline performance as the load increases   We re using Apache front-ending Django and MySQL   The OS is Red Hat Enterprise Linux  RHEL    64-bit   We use mod wsgi in daemon mode for Django   We ve done no cache or database optimization other than to accept the defaults     We re all in one VM on a 64-bit Dell with  I think  32Gb RAM    Since performance is almost the same for 20 or 200 concurrent users  we don t need to spend huge amounts of time  tweaking    Instead we simply need to keep our base performance up through ordinary SSL performance improvements  ordinary database design and implementation  indexing  etc    ordinary firewall performance improvements  etc   What we do measure is our load test laptops struggling under the insane workload of 15 processes running 16 concurrent threads of requests

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The developer advocate for YouTube gave a talk about scaling Python at PyCon 2012  which is also relevant to scaling Django   YouTube has more than a billion users  and YouTube is built on Python

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What are the largest sites built on Django today    There isn t any single place that collects information about traffic on Django built sites  so I ll have to take a stab at it using data from various locations   First  we have a list of Django sites on the front page of the main Django project page and then a list of Django built sites at djangosites org   Going through the lists and picking some that I know have decent traffic we see    Instagram  What Powers Instagram  Hundreds of Instances  Dozens of Technologies  Pinterest  Alexa rank 37  21 4 2015  and 70 Million users in 2013 Bitbucket  200TB of Code and 2 500 000 Users Disqus  Serving 400 million people with Python  curse com  600k daily visits  tabblo com  44k daily visits  see Ned Batchelder s posts Infrastructure for modern web sites  chesspark com  Alexa rank about 179k  pownce com  no longer active   alexa rank about 65k  Mike Malone of Pownce  in his EuroDjangoCon presentation on Scaling Django Web Apps says  hundreds of hits per second    This is a very good presentation on how to scale Django  and makes some good points including  current  shortcomings in Django scalability  HP had a site built with Django 1 5  ePrint center  However  as for novemer 2015 the entire website was migrated and this link is just a redirect  This website was a world-wide service attending subscription to Instant Ink and related services HP offered        Can Django deal with 100 000 users daily  each visiting the site for a couple of hours    Yes  see above   Could a site like Stack Overflow run on Django    My gut feeling is yes but  as others answered and Mike Malone mentions in his presentation  database design is critical  Strong proof might also be found at www cnprog com if we can find any reliable traffic stats  Anyway  it s not just something that will happen by throwing together a bunch of Django models      There are  of course  many more sites and bloggers of interest  but I have got to stop somewhere     Blog post about Using Django to build high-traffic site michaelmoore com described as a top 10 000 website   Quantcast stats and compete com stats         The author of the edit  including such reference  used to work as outsourced developer in that project

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I develop high traffic sites using Django for the national broadcaster in Ireland  It works well for us  Developing a high performance site is more than about just choosing a framework  A framework will only be one part of a system that is as strong as it s weakest link  Using the latest framework  X  won t solve your performance issues if the problem is slow database queries or a badly configured server or network

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Not sure about the number of daily visits but here are a few examples of large Django sites    disqus com  talk from djangocon  bitbucket org  write up  lanyrd com  source  support mozilla com  source code  addons mozilla org  source code   talk from djangocon  theonion com  write up  The guardian co uk comment system uses Django  source  instagram pinterest rdio   Here is a link to list of high traffic Django sites on Quora

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Playing devil s advocate a little bit   You should check the DjangoCon 2008 Keynote  delivered by Cal Henderson  titled  Why I hate Django  where he pretty much goes over everything Django is missing that you might want to do in a high traffic website  At the end of the day you have to take this all with an open mind because it is perfectly possible to write Django apps that scale  but I thought it was a good presentation and relevant to your question

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What s the  largest  site that s built on Django today   I measure size mostly by user traffic  Pinterest disqus com More here  https   www shuup com en blog 25-of-the-most-popular-python-and-django-websites   Can Django deal with 100 000 users daily  each visiting the site for a couple of hours  Yes but use proper architecture  database design  use of cache  use load balances and multiple servers or nodes  Could a site like Stack Overflow run on Django  Yes just need to follow the answer mentioned in the 2nd question

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I have been using Django for over a year now  and am very impressed with how it manages to combine modularity  scalability and speed of development  Like with any technology  it comes with a learning curve  However  this learning curve is made a lot less steep by the excellent documentation from the Django community  Django has been able to handle everything I have thrown at it really well  It looks like it will be able to scale well into the future   BidRodeo Penny Auctions is a moderately sized Django powered website  It is a very dynamic website and does handle a good number of page views a day

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I think we might as well add Apple s App of the year for 2011  Instagram  to the list which uses django intensively

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You can definitely run a high-traffic site in Django  Check out this pre-Django 1 0 but still relevant post here  http   menendez com blog launching-high-performance-django-site

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I don t think the issue is really about Django scaling    I really suggest you look into your architecture that s what will help you with your scaling needs If you get that wrong there is no point on how well Django performs  Performance    Scale  You can have a system that has amazing performance but does not scale and vice versa   Is your application database bound  If it is then your scale issues lay there as well  How are you planning on interacting with the database from Django  What happens when you database cannot process requests as fast as Django accepts them  What happens when your data outgrows one physical machine  You need to account for how you plan on dealing with those circumstances   Moreover  What happens when your traffic outgrows one app server  how you handle sessions in this case can be tricky  more often than not you would probably require a shared nothing architecture  Again that depends on your application   In short languages is not what determines scale  a language is responsible for performance again depending on your applications  different languages perform differently   It is your design and architecture that makes scaling a reality    I hope it helps  would be glad to help further if you have questions

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