Django for social networking [closed]

Answer 1

Pinterest & Instagram use django, i'm sure it's scaleable, for most loaded parts such as activities feed you can use in-memory storage like Redis.

high-load sites on django

Disqus http://www.slideshare.net/zeeg/djangocon-2010-scaling-disqus

Pinterest http://www.slideshare.net/eonarts/mysql-meetup-july2012scalingpinterest

Instagram http://instagram-engineering.tumblr.com/

Answer 2

Off my head ...

Pinax has a profile for a social networking site.

Convore and Disqus uses Django for some parts of their websites.

About Django scalability - Does Django Scale ?

Edit: Found this while I was googling for something else.

PyCon 2011: Django: Pitfalls I Encountered and How to Avoid Them

Presented by Luke Sneeringer

Are you starting a moderate to large sized Django project? Do you need to plan ahead and build an application that will react to unanticipated needs? This talk covers some techniques and pitfalls I encountered in writing my first reasonably large Django site, and what I did differently the second time I started a project.

Answer 3

Django can certainly be used to build a social network, It offers great features for performance enhancements like caching. See this post on scaling.

The main bottleneck will come with how you design your models. In my experience, creating deep nested foreign links and many joins(manytomany relations) slows up when you are running complex queries. You should try listfields for such cases. You can also investigate the key/value pair Google uses on its big table in appengine, it scales more than relation databases.

You should also page items conviently, you may want to use ajax to still keep the user experience and prevent users from loading pages just to see more posts.

Answer 4

This question talks about scaling with Django. That may boost your confidence in trying to create a potentially large site.

Answer 5

This is not an issue only on Django or python, it's a thing of cloud and software engineering. One server alone may be ok for 10,000 users, given they are not concurrent, also location, are these users in the same city? country?

I believe Django is very good and I will use it my self in a similar project, my issue is not Django but the IaaS, the infrastructure where I will run this on.

If you are still worried if Python is the answer then you can research about, Ruby on Rails, and asp .Net, even perl, php, stuff like that. To me, Python is definitely the answer.

Answer 6

"What are its potential weaknesses, and things that need to be focused on in order to make it as fast as possible?"

The one thing you might be worried about further down the road is that depending on how you create your models and connect them to one another, you may run into an issue where a single page generates many, many, many queries.

This is especially true if you're using a model that involves a generic relation.

Let's say you're using django-activity-stream to create a list of recent events (similar to Facebook's News Feed). django-activity-stream basically creates a list of generic relations. For each of these generic relations you're going to have to run a query to get information about that object. And, since it's generic (i.e. you're not writing a custom query for each kind of object), if that object has its own relations that you want to output, you might be looking at something like 40-100 queries for an activity feed with just 20-30 items.

Running 40-100 queries for a single request is not optimal behavior.

The good news is that Django is really just a bunch of classes and functions written in python. Almost anything you write in python can be added into Django, so you can always write your own functions or code to optimize a given request.

Choosing another framework is not going to avoid the problem of scalability; it's just going to present different difficulties in different areas.

Also, you can look into things like caching in order to speed up responses and prevent server load.