PyPy 1.4.1 released
morepypy.blogspot.com
morepypy.blogspot.com
http://speed.pypy.org/comparison/?exe=1%2B172,3%2B172,1%2BL,...
It's normalized so that CPython is 1.0 and lower numbers mean faster time on the benchmarks. The "django" benchmark is just template rendering. The "rietveld" benchmark is a full django app.
Edit: I should clarify: this site doesn't use a DB engine but instead is pulling and rending content from an XML DB over a REST API. See Alex's note below about DB performance for why this is an important point.
Just a random suggestion, but might it be easier (and less taxing) to have a background job pull the XML into a TMPFS (ramdisk) then update it every 5 minutes or so?