How to measure Django cache performance?
Just try it out. Use firebug or a similar tool and run memcache with a bit of RAM allocation (e.g. 64mb) on the test server.
Mark your average loading results seen in firebug without memcache, then turn caching on and mark new results. That's done as easy as it said.
The results usually shocks people, because the perfomance raises up very nicely.
I have a rather small (ca. 4.5k pageviews a day) website running on Django, with PostgreSQL 8.3 as the db.
I am using the database as both the cache and the sesssion backend. I've heard a lot of good things about using Memcached for this purpose, and I would definitely like to give it a try.  However, I would like to know exactly what would be the benefits of such a change: I imagine  that my site may be just not big enough for the better cache backend to make a difference.  The point is: it wouldn't be me who would be installing and configuring memcached, and I don't want to waste somebody's time for nothing or very little.
How can I measure the overhead introduced by using the db as the cache backend? I've looked at django-debug-toolbar, but if I understand correctly it isn't something you'd like to put on a production site (you have to set DEBUG=True for it to work). Unfortunately, I cannot quite reproduce the production setting on my laptop (I have a different OS, CPU and a lot more RAM).
Has anyone benchmarked different Django cache/session backends? Does anybody know what would be the performance difference if I was doing, for example, one session-write on every request?