For the profiling, I'd also recommend `run_profile_server` from django-extensions, and Snakeviz as a visualiser for that data. It records cprofile reports per-request so can be useful for seeing what takes the time in a single request.

Common hot-spots I've noticed (other than n+1 queries) is deserialisation of database rows into Django ORM objects - it's relatively expensive, and template rendering. I'd definitely choose Jinja2 on a new project for templating as it's more generally more capable and approximately 2x faster, the downside being the goal of "logic-less templates" is slightly harder to achieve.