Django site very slow to load after restart or period of inactivity

I'm running a Django site on Apache, and am experiencing very slow intial page loads after a period of inactivity (about 1 hour). I can replicate by leaving for an hour, or bouncing the server. After the initial load, pages load consistently in < 1 sec.

I'm assuming (guessing) the issue is the Python interpreter + Python modules are being loaded into memory again after these periods of inactivity?

I've followed http://blog.dscpl.com.au/2009/03/load-spikes-and-excessive-memory-usage.html and am running mod_wsgi in daemon mode.

Server config:

Timeout 20
KeepAlive Off
MaxKeepAlive开发者_StackOverflow社区Requests 100
KeepAliveTimeout 15
ServerLimit 10

<IfModule mpm_prefork_module>
    StartServers          2
    MinSpareServers       2
    MaxSpareServers       2
    MaxClients            4
    MaxRequestsPerChild   0
</IfModule>

...

WSGIDaemonProcess django display-name=%{GROUP}
WSGIScriptAlias / /path/to/osqa.wsgi process-group=django application-group=%{GLOBAL}

Is something obviously wrong with the config above, or is there a way to keep the Python interpreter in memory?

Perhaps this a different issue altogether?

Thanks

A few ideas:

• Make sure you have enough memory and that there is some free and a healthy disk cache available. You should have at least 1gb to 4+gb total depending on what you are doing. Top was mentioned, and I recommend htop: http://htop.sourceforge.net/
• Increase disk caching, if for example, you are using an IO poor VM such as EC2/EBS.
• Tune your db to appropriate values with regards to memory.
• If caching check timeouts as mentioned above. If no one visiting in the hour caches will expire.
• Configure Linux (?) to swap less aggressively:
  • echo 20 > /proc/sys/vm/swappiness
  • Permanently: add vm.swappiness in /etc/sysctl.conf