Django persistent database connection

Question

I\'m using django with apache and mod_wsgi and PostgreSQL (all on same host), and I need to handle a lot of simple dynamic page requests (hundreds per second). I faced with

Answer 1

In Django trunk, edit django/db/__init__.py and comment out the line:

signals.request_finished.connect(close_connection)

This signal handler causes it to disconnect from the database after every request. I don't know what all of the side-effects of doing this will be, but it doesn't make any sense to start a new connection after every request; it destroys performance, as you've noticed.

I'm using this now, but I havn't done a full set of tests to see if anything breaks.

I don't know why everyone thinks this needs a new backend or a special connection pooler or other complex solutions. This seems very simple, though I don't doubt there are some obscure gotchas that made them do this in the first place--which should be dealt with more sensibly; 5ms overhead for every request is quite a lot for a high-performance service, as you've noticed. (It takes me 150ms--I havn't figured out why yet.)

Edit: another necessary change is in django/middleware/transaction.py; remove the two transaction.is_dirty() tests and always call commit() or rollback(). Otherwise, it won't commit a transaction if it only read from the database, which will leave locks open that should be closed.