I kinda feel that in this day, you just shouldn't be running Django on DreamHost. New Xen hosts (like
http://prgmr.com/xen/) are popping up a lot now and they're offering real capacity at DreamHost prices. DreamHost is fine for certain things, but more advanced hosting has come a long way since 5 years ago where DreamHost offered a lot.
Even if you want a shared/managed solution, WebFaction offers a much better environment for Django since they don't kill long-running processes and officially support Django.