Making Django Web Application Faster

In a recent project of building an e-commerce web app in Django, some requests were relatively slow when retrieving items from the database, especially when using query filtering.

To overcome this challenge, I used database indexes to improve performance for query filtering or ordering results by this field. A database index is a data structure that improves the speed of data retrieval operations on a database table. An index is created on one or more table columns, providing a quick way to look up rows based on the indexed column values.

How to implement in Django

To implement database indexing in Django, I created a Meta class inside the model class, and inside the class a variable list called indexes that contains the fields to be indexed. Here is a snippet of the implementation.

# this class is defined inside a Model Class in this case a Product class
class Meta:
        indexes = [
            models.Index(fields=['id', 'slug']),
            models.Index(fields=['name']),
            models.Index(fields=['-created']),
        ]

In the implementation above, the indexes option defines database indexes for our Product model which contains the fields; id, slug, name, and created(in descending order). The indexes could also be defined as function expressions and database functions.

The creation of indexes will be included in the database migrations.

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