[FIXED] How to measure Django cache performance?

Issue

I have a rather small (ca. 4.5k pageviews a day) website running on Django, with PostgreSQL 8.3 as the db.

I am using the database as both the cache and the sesssion backend. I've heard a lot of good things about using Memcached for this purpose, and I would definitely like to give it a try. However, I would like to know exactly what would be the benefits of such a change: I imagine that my site may be just not big enough for the better cache backend to make a difference. The point is: it wouldn't be me who would be installing and configuring memcached, and I don't want to waste somebody's time for nothing or very little.

How can I measure the overhead introduced by using the db as the cache backend? I've looked at django-debug-toolbar, but if I understand correctly it isn't something you'd like to put on a production site (you have to set DEBUG=True for it to work). Unfortunately, I cannot quite reproduce the production setting on my laptop (I have a different OS, CPU and a lot more RAM).

Has anyone benchmarked different Django cache/session backends? Does anybody know what would be the performance difference if I was doing, for example, one session-write on every request?

Solution

At my previous work we tried to measure caching impact on site we was developing. On the same machine we load-tested the set of 10 pages that are most commonly used as start pages (object listings), plus some object detail pages taken randomly from the pool of ~200000. The difference was like 150 requests/second to 30000 requests/second and the database queries dropped to 1-2 per page.

What was cached:

• sessions
• lists of objects retrieved for each individual page in object listing
• secondary objects and common content (found on each page)
• lists of object categories and other categorising properties
• object counters (calculated offline by cron job)
• individual objects

In general, we used only low-level granular caching, not the high-level cache framework. It required very careful design (cache had to be properly invalidated upon each database state change, like adding or modifying any object).

Answered By - zgoda

Answer Checked By - Dawn Plyler (PHPFixing Volunteer)