Very slow first request in Django Development server

Question

Whenever I run python manage.py runserver and accesses my website with localhost:8000 in the browser, the first request is VERY slow (around 10 seconds).

Following requests are really fast. Is there any way to improve the performance of this? It's very unconvenient because while in development, it's always reloading due to updates to the code.

Thanks a lot.

What if you open `127.0.0.1:8000` instead? Any difference? – alecxe Jan 11 '15 at 00:25 — alecxe, Jan 11 '15 at 00:25

Andrea Rabbaglietti · Answer 1 · 2023-07-04T22:18:00.347

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You will have this kind of issue if you start runserver on 0.0.0.0 instead of 127.0.0.1 since it has to resolve some strange route interface loop.

edited Jul 04 '23 at 22:18

answered May 11 '20 at 15:07

Andrea Rabbaglietti

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Thank you! This resolved it for me on macOS and saves me lots of time waiting – contmp Jun 06 '20 at 02:07
Lifesaver really. This instantly fixed it. In PyCharm, you can change the host used by editing the run configuration. – WayToDoor Mar 28 '23 at 08:20

score 1 · Answer 2 · answered Jan 11 '15 at 01:06

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Does this happen to empty Django project (freshly generated) or just for your specific site?

Without having more specific information it is hard to tell why.

The first request most likely lazily initializes some data. It could e.g. call external websites to get data and is slow due to bad DNS or slow Internet connection. Alternative, caches are empty and they are repopulated on the startup of the Django development server.

answered Jan 11 '15 at 01:06

Mikko Ohtamaa

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Specific project only, thanks a lot for your answer. Do you know how could I debug? – jhagege Jan 11 '15 at 01:18
Try Django Debug Toolbar https://github.com/django-debug-toolbar/django-debug-toolbar as the first shot – Mikko Ohtamaa Jan 11 '15 at 01:27
Found it, Middleware that sends data to a remote monitoring service. Solution was to activate it only on production server and not in dev! – jhagege Jan 11 '15 at 01:39

score 0 · Answer 3 · answered Aug 24 '16 at 12:38

Use django-debug-toolbar ,django-debug-toolbar is a very handy tool that provides insights into what your code is doing and how much time it spends doing it. In particular it can show you all the SQL queries your page is generating, and how long each one has taken.

score -7 · Accepted Answer · answered Jan 11 '15 at 20:46

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Found it, Middleware that sends data to a remote monitoring service. Solution was to activate it only on production server and not in dev!

answered Jan 11 '15 at 20:46

jhagege

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what middleware was it? how did you figure it out? – jsmedmar Mar 03 '19 at 06:25
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That should never be accepted as the answer, there no answer here. it just hat you found something and disabled it, u didn't even mention how did you debug it or what was the middleware. – Ahmed Wagdi May 02 '20 at 09:13
What is the solution then? – Andrea Rabbaglietti May 11 '20 at 11:35

Very slow first request in Django Development server

4 Answers4