Django in use at washingtonpost.com

Posted by Adrian Holovaty on December 8, 2005

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.

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