Loading time is problematic with lots of students (e.g. oh hey, production)... this unfortunately can't really be helped except via a reddit-like re-generation of pages when a student changes their majors, and then keeping that cache indefinitely until it's changed. I say unfortunately because we don't have any sort of task queue already set up. That said, email alerts and the like will eventually require a background task queue, so may as well start working on it now. Please note that Celery 3.1's API is completely incompatible with previous versions: keep that in mind when reviewing tutorials.

Celery:

Docs: http://docs.celeryproject.org/en/latest/django/first-steps-with-django.html

Tutorials: https://godjango.com/63-deferred-tasks-and-scheduled-jobs-with-celery-31-django-17-and-redis/ https://realpython.com/blog/python/asynchronous-tasks-with-django-and-celery/

Caching:

https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.8/topics/cache/

no separation for students who live off campus-- they're lumped in with privacy-hidden students (unfortunately, this requires still another loop)

we have the facebook picture size as a branch-- I keep on forgetting that's a problem and I need to merge it in because I don't see it in the dev environment