Cleanest & Fastest server setup for Django [closed]

Answer 1

If you're using lighthttpd, you can also use FastCGI for serving Django. I'm not sure how the speed compares to mod_wsgi, but if memory serves correctly, you get a couple of the benefits that you would get with mod_wsgi that you wouldn't get with mod_python. The main one being that you can give each application its own process (which is really helpful for keeping memory of different apps separated as well as for taking advantage of multi-core computers.

Edit: Just to add in regards to your update about nginix, if memory serves correctly again, nginix uses "greenlets" to handle concurrency. This means that you may need to be a little bit more careful to make sure that one app doesn't eat up all the server's time.

Answer 2

Keep it simple: Django recommends Apache and mod_wsgi (or mod_python). If serving media files is a very big part of your service, consider Amazon S3 or Rackspace CloudFiles.

Answer 3

The best configuration is not so known I think. But here is:

1. Use nginx for serving requests (dynamic to app, static content directly).
2. Use python web server for serving dynamic content.

Two most speedy solutions for python-based web server is:

• cogen
• fapws2

You need to look into google to find current best configuration for django (still in development).

Answer 4

The officially recommended way to deploy a django project is to use mod_python with apache. This is described in the documentation. The main pro with this is that it is the best documented, most supported, and most common way to deploy. The con is that it probably isn't the fastest.

Answer 5

I’m using nginx (0.6.32 taken from Sid) with mod_wsgi. It works very well, though I can’t say whether it’s better than the alternatives because I never tried any. Nginx has memcached support built in, which can perhaps interoperate with the Django caching middleware (I don’t actually use it, instead I fill the cache manually using python-memcache and invalidate it when changes are made), so cache hits completely bypass Django (my development machine can serve about 3000 requests per second).

A caveat: nginx’ mod_wsgi highly dislikes named locations (it tries to pass them in SCRIPT_NAME), so the obvious ‘error_page 404 = @django’ will cause numerous obscure errors. I had to patch mod_wsgi source to fix that.

Answer 6

Since I was looking for some more in-depth answers, I decided to research the issue myself in depth. Please let me know if I've misunderstood anything.

Some general recommendation are to use a separate webserver for handling media. By separate, I mean a webserver which is not running Django. This server can be for instance:

• Lighttpd (Lighty)
• Nginx (EngineX)
• Or some other light-weight server

Then, for Django, you can go down different paths. You can either:

• Serve Django via Apache and:

  • mod_python

    This is the stable and recommended/well documented way. Cons: uses a lot of memory.

  • mod_wsgi

    From what I understand, mod_wsgi is a newer alternative. It appears to be faster and easier on resources.

  • mod_fastcgi

    When using FastCGI you are delegating the serving of Django to another process. Since mod_python includes a python interpreter in every request it uses a lot of memory. This is a way to bypass that problem. Also there is some security concerns.

    What you do is that you start your Django FastCGI server in a separate process and then configures apache via rewrites to call this process when needed.

Or you can:

• Serve Django without using Apache but with another server that supports FastCGI natively:

  (The documentation mentions that you can do this if you don't have any Apache specific needs. I guess the reason must be to save memory.)

  • Lighttpd

  This is the server that runs Youtube. It seems fast and easy to use, however i've seen reports on memoryleaks.

  • nginx

  I've seen benchmarks claiming that this server is even faster than lighttpd. It's mostly documented in Russian though.

Another thing, due to limitations in Python your server should be running in forked mode, not threaded.

So this is my current research, but I want more opinions and experiences.