Django/mod_wsgi: First page loads up VERY slowly

I'm trying to deploy my first django site through mod_wsgi (on a VPS that also serves PHP pages). Once the first django page is loaded the site runs pretty quick, but loading up that first page is excruciating - at least 15 seconds, sometimes 30 seconds+.

During the first page loadup memory (384MB) is maxed out & other tasks also slow to a crawl. I'm pretty new to django so not quite sure how to solve this. Unfortunately running django through it's own server (as opposed to one that also ser开发者_运维问答ves PHP) isn't really feasible.

Any suggestions appreciated.

As answered on #django, likely because embedded mode being used and not daemon mode. Dangers of this described at:

http://blog.dscpl.com.au/2009/03/load-spikes-and-excessive-memory-usage.html