As previously noted, this blog now runs under Django, on the lowest-end VPS that’s available from VPSLink. The virtual machine (a Xen instance) has 64Mb of RAM, 2Gb of disk, and some portion of the hardware CPU.

This little project has been a very good, well-defined, small, controlled laboratory for learning more about Django. Since we’re using Django at work, it’s helpful for me to know more about it.

Django has a lot of built-in capabilities, and I’ve only begun to scratch the surface. For instance:

• It has its own rich template language that supports, among other things, template inheritance.
• It has a built-in, powerful, yet easy-to-use ORM.
• It uses an MVC-like “model-view-template” approach that, while slightly different from true MVC, still keeps business logic separate from presentation logic.
• It has built-in caching support for a variety of caching technologies (disk, database, in-process memory, and memcache).
• It supports any RDBMS that Python supports.
• It has loads of capabilities, but doesn’t force you to use anything you don’t need. It’s a lot like Spring in that regard: You use what you need, and add new capabilities as the situation requires.

The low-end VPS I use isn’t a super high performer, so I’ve chosen to use a SQLite database for my blog. This decision is proving to be a good one, for a couple reasons:

• The database requirements of my blog aren’t especially demanding. 99% of the time, Django is simply reading from the database to serve content. And since I’m using caching, it’s not even reading from the database every time.

• SQLite stores its database in a single file, which means I can easily back it up. It also means I can write my blog posts to a faster local Django mirror, and then simply upload the new database file when I’m ready to publish. (This is, in fact, exactly what I do.)

• SQLite doesn’t use a database server; it’s entirely a file protocol. Not having to run an additional PostgreSQL or MySQL server on the VPS is a Good Thing.

In addition to all those advantages, though, Django has proved to be an excellent platform for incremental development; I am able to add features to my blog slowly, without ripping everything apart. In addition, I can add new capabilities without writing a whole lot of code. I wrote the blog software myself, but Django does a lot of the heavy lifting. As a result, I was able to build a fully-functioning blog engine in less than a day, using about 400 lines of Python and a little more than 400 lines of template code.

That’s just outrageous.

Running Django on such a small VPS instance poses some performance issues. Here’s what I’ve done to alleviate some of the problems.

• Followed the VPSLink wiki suggestions on tuning Apache for low-memory configurations.
• Added “Accept-Encoding: gzip”, Expires, and Etags headers to Apache and Django.
• Added server-side caching to Django. As noted above, Django support several different ways to cache rendered pages. I’m using in-process memory (locmem) at the moment.
• Reduced the number of entries on the main blog page from 20 to 5. (The entire archive is available through various other links, so no harm.)

These measures seem to have improved performance a bit.