I did a similar exercise to this recently on a project. Once you have lots of data, it's amazing how much speed-up you can get. ORMs have many benefits; however, in hiding the SQL, they can actually let you create some pretty poor architecture because you forget (or simply don't know) about all the queries that go on in the background. I have a love/hate thing going on with them.
It does feel like 90% of the time the performance does NOT matter. And the rare (but fun!) moments where it matters the Django ORM makes it really easy to escape out to more performant (and maybe less neat) options.
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I did a similar exercise to this recently on a project. Once you have lots of data, it's amazing how much speed-up you can get. ORMs have many benefits; however, in hiding the SQL, they can actually let you create some pretty poor architecture because you forget (or simply don't know) about all the queries that go on in the background. I have a love/hate thing going on with them.
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It does feel like 90% of the time the performance does NOT matter. And the rare (but fun!) moments where it matters the Django ORM makes it really easy to escape out to more performant (and maybe less neat) options.