April 15th 2009

Targeted optimisation with django-dumpslow

django-dumpslow is a reusable Django application that logs requests that take a long time to execute and provides an tool to summarise the resulting data.

Modelled on mysqldumpslow, django-dumpslow is intended as a tool to determine which parts of a project might benefit most from optimisation and to provide valuable empirical data.

The tool groups requests that are similar by exploiting Django's ability to reverse URLs - requests that use the same view are not counted distinctly. Views can then be grouped by the total accumulated time spent by that view or simply by their raw frequency in the logs.

An example output is:

$ ./manage.py dumpslow
View                                         Accumulated time
=============================================================
example.views.slow                                     92.88
/unknown (unreversible url)                            16.84

If the log entries contain timestamps then django-dumpslow can optionally limit queries by a user-defined interval. This can be useful for generating regular reports of slow pages, perhaps by regularly emailing the "top 10 worst pages" to a development mailing list.

Source, tarballs, etc. Patches welcome.




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