Django Textile/Markdown Template Caching Speedup

I've been putting some time into updating an old site this weekend. I noticed that the homepage was taking a long time to load - around 5 to 8 seconds. Not good.

I tried caching queries but it didn't help at all. Then I realized it was most likely due to my decision long ago to use textile to render text to HTML.

The site is located at direct-vs-dish.com. It essentially compares DIRECTV to DISH Network. On the home page is a number of features. Each feature represents a database record. Here is my original model for the features:

class Feature(models.Model):
    category = models.CharField(max_length=255)
    slug = models.SlugField()
    overview = models.TextField(blank=True, null=True)
    dish = models.TextField(blank=True, null=True)
    directv = models.TextField(blank=True, null=True)
    dish_link = models.URLField(blank=True, null=True)
    directv_link = models.URLField(blank=True, null=True)
    order = models.PositiveSmallIntegerField()

    def __unicode__(self):
        return self.category

    class Meta:
        ordering = ['order']

Three of the above fields use textile: overview, dish, & directv. I currently have 14 feature records. So that is a potential of 42 textile conversions for the home page.

In order to cache these textile conversions, I added three new fields. I then added a save method to populate the cached html fields. My model now looks like this:

class Feature(models.Model):
    category = models.CharField(max_length=255)
    slug = models.SlugField()
    overview = models.TextField(blank=True, null=True)
    overview_html = models.TextField(blank=True)
    dish = models.TextField(blank=True, null=True)
    dish_html = models.TextField(blank=True)
    directv = models.TextField(blank=True, null=True)
    directv_html = models.TextField(blank=True)
    dish_link = models.URLField(blank=True, null=True)
    directv_link = models.URLField(blank=True, null=True)
    order = models.PositiveSmallIntegerField()

    def __unicode__(self):
        return self.category

    def save(self, **kwargs):
        self.overview_html = textile(self.overview)
        self.dish_html = textile(self.dish)
        self.directv_html = textile(self.directv)
        return super(Feature, self).save(kwargs)

    class Meta:
        ordering = ['order']

I use the Django admin to edit features so I added some styling to hide the cached HTML fields with an option to show them if you want to see what has been converted and cached.

class FeatureAdmin(admin.ModelAdmin):
    list_display = ('category', 'order')
    prepopulated_fields = {"slug": ("category",)}
    fieldsets = (
        (None, {
            'fields': ('category', 'slug', 'overview', 'dish', 'dish_link',
                       'directv', 'directv_link', 'order')
        }),
        ('Auto Generated', {
            'classes': ('collapse',),
            'fields': ('overview_html', 'dish_html', 'directv_html'),
        }),
    )
admin.site.register(Feature, FeatureAdmin)

My template tags went from this:

{{ feature.overview|textile }}

To this:

{{ feature.overview_html|safe }}

This has dropped my homepage rending time to about 750ms. This is without any caching of queries. Huge win!