It's been sitting at about 300k pageviews a month, which is not that much considering. If there are high-profile blogs running I may have to consider upgrading.
In short: these numbers aren’t adding up to me, so I suspect that either I’ve misunderstood or misinterpreted something, or there’s some simple low-hanging performance fruit to pick, some simple misconfiguration of e.g. template or data caching or DB connection pooling or something.
My guess is that 300k pvs mostly follow daylight probably on North America only. So you probably have peaks around 21-23 and almost nothing between 01-08am.
And of course, if you write it in C these numbers look awful, but I'd say for run-of-the-mill django they are quite good. I'm willing to bet most django sites you find on heroku free tier don't handle this kind of pressure.
Even being as generous as I can imagine, that’s still each request consuming over 200ms of system resources, which for something like this would be terrible. It’s some years since I’ve done any Django, but I remember measuring a fairly simple django CMS installation (which is waaaay more complex than this) in 2013 taking 50–80ms to serve most pages, with the slowest page averaging something like 180ms; my recollection is that I took those measurements before doing any deliberate performance tuning (I don’t think I’d put the cached template loader in yet—it wasn’t in the default config back then—and I think it may have even not been doing connection pooling).
Given the scope of this app, I figure it should be doing one or two simple and well-indexed SELECT queries only, and maybe an INSERT or UPDATE for analytics, but nothing more with its database. I would think 20ms should be oodles of time to do everything even in Django.
<style>
body:hover {
background: url("/hit/12345");
}
</style>
I was taking this into account in my figures.