01
Workers blocked on external APIs
Synchronous workers waiting on third-party HTTP and LLM calls.
Synchronous WSGI bottlenecks, high memory use and slow AI streaming
Django to async FastAPI modernization
Move concurrency-heavy endpoints from Django to async FastAPI, standardize validation with Pydantic, and keep the Django admin for operations.
Symptoms
Signs your platform has this problem
If several of these sound familiar, the plan below is where we would start.
02
No streaming AI responses
Server-Sent Events and WebSockets for generative AI are awkward on synchronous Django.
03
Heavy memory footprint
Many Django worker processes consuming expensive RAM.
Remediation plan
How we fix it, step by step
Each phase ends with a measurement, so you can see what changed before the next one starts.
01
Async SQLAlchemy 2.0 and Alembic
Porting Django ORM models to async SQLAlchemy 2.0 with the asyncpg driver.
02
Pydantic v2 schemas
Replacing Django forms and serializers with Pydantic v2 validation models.
03
Incremental reverse-proxy routing
Routing high-concurrency API paths to FastAPI while the Django admin stays in place.
04
Uvicorn and uvloop
Running FastAPI on Uvicorn with uvloop and pooled PostgreSQL connections.
Technical checklist
Remediation checklist
What we check before a change goes to production:
- Port Django ORM models to async SQLAlchemy 2.0 with asyncpg
- Standardize request and response validation with Pydantic v2
- Run Uvicorn with uvloop and non-blocking connection pools
- Keep the Django admin for operations while APIs move to FastAPI
What we measure
We take a baseline first and report the same measurements after each change, from your own monitoring — evidence, not promised results.
- Concurrency
- Requests in flight per instance under a load test
- p95 latency
- Migrated endpoints, before and after
- Memory
- Memory per container at the same traffic
Related service
Custom software
Custom software for Indian SMEs and startups, built around your workflow with an agreed scope, review milestones, clear ownership and documented handover.
Explore Custom softwareQuestions
Questions about this remediation
Yes. A common architecture keeps Django for administrative dashboards while FastAPI handles high-concurrency public API traffic against the same database.
FastAPI is async-native, validates with Pydantic v2 (its core is written in Rust) and generates OpenAPI documentation from type hints. DRF brings Django's ORM, admin and a mature ecosystem. The difference matters most on I/O-bound endpoints — measure yours before moving everything.
Related playbooks
Other engineering problem playbooks
Auth0 to Clerk identity migration playbook
Move off per-MAU Auth0 pricing and redirects: export users and password hashes, set up organizations and SSO, and embed sign-in in your own app.
Terraform drift remediation and infrastructure as code
Bring console-created resources under Terraform or OpenTofu, split monolithic state, and run every infrastructure change through a reviewed plan in CI.
Docker image optimization and container hardening
Make container images smaller and safer: multi-stage builds, minimal base images, layer caching and non-root users, with vulnerability scans in CI.
ClickHouse real-time analytics architecture and migration
Serve customer-facing dashboards from ClickHouse instead of an OLTP database or a per-query-billed warehouse: model for your queries, ingest from Kafka, pre-aggregate on write.
Want an engineer to look at this with you?
Send us the symptoms and any metrics you have. We'll reply within one business day, set up a call and agree what to measure before anything changes.