At Stik.com, we're using Django to supply a RESTful interface to our database. Our support staff is also using its admin for simple ticket items. Fortunately for the business, but unfortunately for the Django admin, we have lots of tables with hundreds of millions of rows, and a few in the billions. We really didn't want to spend the time writing our own admin section for support staff, so the Django admin was a godsend... until we rolled it out to production and saw admin pages never respond ever. Read on to see what our problem was and how we fixed it.

The problem(s):

Large tables in InnoDB may not be able to even render their change_list view due to (possibly 2) expensive COUNT(*) queries. With tables of 100M+ records, this can take 15+ minutes to complete, even on fast servers.

First, allow me to make a few assumptions:

1. You're running Mac OS X 10.8.
2. You have MAMP 2.x installed (and this is preventing MySQL-python from installing).
3. You're going to run your Django site within a virtualenv (If you weren't planning on doing this, now's a great time to change your mind!).
4. You're tired of PHP and you want to use Django, but because of other projects are unable to remove MAMP and start fresh.

Why it's failing:

MySQL-python won't compile because it needs the MySQL headers which are not in the expected location under a MAMP install. Luckily, this isn't hard to remedy.