Once your site starts getting heavy traffic, you will need to start exploring several caching strategies throughout your stack. Using Varnish, a caching server that sits between your users and Django, many of your requests might not even hit the Django server.
Varnish can make pages load extremely fast (sometimes, hundreds of times faster than normal). However, if used improperly, it might serve static pages to your users. Varnish can be easily configured to recognize dynamic pages or dynamic parts of a page such as a shopping cart.
Russian doll caching, popular in the rails community, is an interesting template cache-invalidation pattern. Imagine a user's timeline page with a series of posts, each containing a nested list ...
