Yeah I spoke in past tense about the performance problems because, as you said, there were an awful lot of easy wins to be made. The site is about 2 orders of magnitude faster now, which is incredibly satisfying.

> Flask's not your problem. You'll have equal or worse woes (if lower level with less hand holding) with anything else.

I’m not so sure about that. It’s hard to run the experiment, but I’ve never seen a nodejs app run anywhere near that slowly. The default-synchronous nature of Python combined with its mediocre performance for straight code magnifies the impact of any bad design choices. At least in a nodejs application your server can happily run many sql queries at the same time, or do other work while it waits for the database. I’m sure sufficiently mediocre web server code can bring nodejs to its knees. But in a decade of working with node, I’ve never seen it done. Certainly not in a web app with only 20 users.