My setup is django 1.3 and the default mod_wsgi and apache packages for ubuntu 10.04. I tested one view of my app on my development VM (DEBUG and debugging toolbar off):
ab -n 200 -c 5 http://127.0.0.1/
and got 4 requests per second. This seemed slow so I simplified the queries, used indexes, etc. to the point where debugging toolbar tells me I have 4 queries taking 8ms. Running the same test, I only get 8 requests per second. The CPU seems to be at 100% the whole time. This seems quite slow for what is now a quite simple view, but it is just a low powered VM.
I decided to start up a large ec2 instance (4 cpu) to see what kind of performance I would get on that class of machine and was surprised to only get 13 requests per second. How can I change the configuration of apache/mod_wsgi to get more performance out of this class of machine?
I think I am using worker rather than prefork:
$ /usr/sbin/apache2 -l
Compiled in modules:
core.c
mod_log_config.c
mod_logio.c
worker.c
http_core.c
mod_so.c
My worker configuration is:
<IfModule mpm_worker_module>
StartServers 2
MinSpareThreads 25
MaxSpareThreads 75
ThreadLimit 64
ThreadsPerChild 25
MaxClients 150
MaxRequestsPerChild 0
</IfModule>
and my WSGI settings look like this:
WSGIScriptAlias / /home/blah/site/proj/wsgi.py
WSGIDaemonProcess blah user=blah group=blah processes=1 threads=10
WSGIProcessGroup blah
Thanks very much for your help!