Django Async: What's new and what's next?

I love Django &#x2F; Django Rest Framework and have used it for a long time, but we recently dumped it from a project in favor of FastAPI.<p>There is just so many layers of magic in Django, that it was becoming impossible for us to improve the performance to an acceptable level. We isolated the problems to serialization &#x2F; deserialization. Going from DB -&gt; Python object -&gt; JSON response was taking far more time than anything else, and just moving over to FastAPI has gotten us a ~5x improvement in response time.<p>I am excited to see where Django async goes though. Its something I had been looking forward to for a while now.

Great article. But I think this part may need as second look:<p><pre><code> If your views involve heavy-lifting calculations or long-running network calls to be done as part of the request path, it’s a great use case for using async views. </code></pre> That seems true for long-running network calls (IO). But for heavy-lifting calculations? I thought that was <i>the</i> canonical example of situations async won&#x27;t improve. CPU bound and memory bound, after all.

Whats the most elegant way for cutting edge Django to do websockets? is it still to &#x27;tack&#x27; on the channels package [0] ?<p>compared to FastAPI[1] I really don&#x27;t want to use it, I only miss the ORM since in FastAPI it looks like you have to manually write the code to insert stuff[2].<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;realpython.com&#x2F;getting-started-with-django-channels&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;realpython.com&#x2F;getting-started-with-django-channels&#x2F;</a><p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;fastapi.tiangolo.com&#x2F;advanced&#x2F;websockets&#x2F;#create-a-websocket" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;fastapi.tiangolo.com&#x2F;advanced&#x2F;websockets&#x2F;#create-a-w...</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;fastapi.tiangolo.com&#x2F;tutorial&#x2F;sql-databases&#x2F;#create-data" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;fastapi.tiangolo.com&#x2F;tutorial&#x2F;sql-databases&#x2F;#create-...</a>

time and time again, whenever I start a new project, Django has always been my go-to choice after analyzing the alternatives. I&#x27;ve worked on large scale, mono-repo, billion users to side projects over the weekend, Django really stay true to the batteries included philosphy.

I think the article and some of the comments are not really looking at this the right way.<p>For most things you&#x27;re probably better off &quot;doing the work&quot; in a celery task, regardless if it is IO bound or CPU bound. Then use web sockets just for your status updates&#x2F;progress bar, instead of having your front end poll on a timer.

I love django, have not used it in years though. I&#x27;ve been in JavaScript land.<p>I&#x27;m consistently surprised that there are not awesome web frameworks in JavaScript similar to Django

I’ve seen lots of blog posts, even the Django docs, saying async is available but still haven’t seen any real world examples yet. Do any exist?<p>Also, I still haven’t seen how the async addition will work with Class Based Views. Also, Django Rest Framework is still considering spending time for support. Until these two use cases are viable many users won’t benefit.

&gt; If your views involve heavy-lifting calculations ...<p>Nooo, not at all. Your tasks should be I&#x2F;O bound, not CPU bound to take advantage of asyncio. Maybe the async server using multiple threads with multiple event loops, but don&#x27;t ever do a CPU-heavy task in an event loop because you just invalidated using asyncio completely.

Looking at the async view example, at what point can we just drop async&#x2F;await keywords and just have Python assume that everything is asynchronous?

Wasn&#x27;t there an article about how the async syntax was benchmarked to actually be <i>slower</i> than the traditional way of using threads? What&#x27;s the current story on python async?<p>reference: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;calpaterson.com&#x2F;async-python-is-not-faster.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;calpaterson.com&#x2F;async-python-is-not-faster.html</a>

I had a bad experience with Django. I found it cluttered and slow. I really wanted to like it. It might seem funny but a more straightforward framework like Symfony didn&#x27;t get it in the way and ended up much faster. Python should be much much faster than PHP but I guess the framework matters a lot too.