title: How to measure Django cache performance?
body: <p>I have a rather small (ca. 4.5k pageviews a day) website running on Django, with PostgreSQL 8.3 as the db.</p>
  
  <p>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.</p>
  
  <p>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 <code>DEBUG=True</code> 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).</p>
  
  <p>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?</p>