Django in use at washingtonpost.com
We've launched the first Django app at washingtonpost.com. The U.S. Congress Votes Database lets you browse every vote in the U.S. Congress since 1991.
Django powers the entire votes site, including the RSS feeds for every member of Congress. The database has more than four million records.
The site was linked-to from the washingtonpost.com home page today during the site's highest-traffic time (9 a.m. to noon), and it didn't break a sweat.
Now may be a good time to point out that performance was specifically one of Django's core design requirements. We Django devs have done some informal benchmarks of Django with other dynamic-language Web frameworks, and we're consistently astounded by how much faster each level of the Django stack is -- from the URL mapper to the database layer to the template system.
Posted by Adrian Holovaty on December 8, 2005
Comments
Bob Ippolito December 9, 2005 at 1:51 a.m.
It'd be nice to see some of those benchmarks
Jaanus December 9, 2005 at 4:02 a.m.
seeing those benchmarks would indeed be great. also, if you can agree with washingtonpost, it would be great to see a sample of requests/hits/visits/datatransferred stats from the washingtonpost -- say, 2 hours from a typical business day during the peak hours, so people would be able to see what kind of volume are we talking about here.
Lad. December 9, 2005 at 4:46 a.m.
Yes, please post some benchmarks
Fredrik December 9, 2005 at 5:14 a.m.
Given that the site says "Generally, we update this site, and the feeds, once a day," how much is precomputed, how much is cached, and how much is done on the fly?
Steve December 9, 2005 at 11:26 a.m.
What database back-end are they using? And yeah, I'd like to see some benchmarks too :)
Waffle December 9, 2005 at 1:08 p.m.
And I would like to see the video's from snakes and rubies?
anyone? anyone?
EspenG December 9, 2005 at 1:53 p.m.
Waffle:
The video is coming, just have patient. The cause of the delay is that editing the video took longer time than Jacob thought.
Karl Guertin December 9, 2005 at 2:08 p.m.
Fredrick, I would stongly suspect that everything you're seeing is cached. There's nothing visitor unique on any of the pages, so there isn't any reason for the pages not to be cached.
As for the site itself, I want to be able to look up my representatives by area code. I just moved and actually don't know who my representatives are.
Mike December 9, 2005 at 11:22 p.m.
I'd also like to know what sort of hardware that site is run on.
dbt December 9, 2005 at 11:55 p.m.
Karl -- offtopic, but you can look it up with your zip+4 on www.house.gov.
Adam April 26, 2006 at 12:16 p.m.
O/T: http://projects.washingtonpost.com/co...
Paul Henry's position is "Not Voting" on all the records I can find... Madness.
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Kunal December 8, 2005 at 11:34 p.m.
Congrats! Now all we need are some screencasts...I'm itching to get started.