If you have huge amount of money, you can just keep throwing hardware at scaling problems. For the rest of us, though, performance tuning is a must.
Note
Incidentally, if anyone with monstrous gobs of cash is actually reading this book, please consider a substantial donation to the Django Foundation. They accept uncut diamonds and gold ingots, too.
Unfortunately, performance tuning is much more of an art than a science, and it is even more difficult to write about than scaling. If you're serious about deploying a large-scale Django application, you should spend a great deal of time learning how to tune each piece of your stack.
The following sections, though, present a few Django-specific tuning tips we've discovered over the years.