The production server my work is pushed to performs significantly worse than my local development environment, where everything runs fast and smoothly, so I cannot figure out if any change I make may or may not have a bad performance in production.
In that server, responses take a lot of time, mostly I assume because of the database queries, rather than the server's processing power and memory capacity.
I wonder if there is any way to set up a server configuration to emulate these bad conditions: how can I reduce the power of my local Django server so that responses take longer, processing power is low and, most importantly, database connection is slow?
I hope this is not a crazy ask, but it is something I really need to figure out how my code will behave in production, since I have no way of telling that from my local environment.
As some comments suggest above, you could slow down the dev server by doing what this answer suggests.
If you suspect the database, you could change the QuerySet methods in db/models/query.py in the django code and add something like this:
from time import sleep
sleep(0.5) # this is seconds, not milliseconds ;)
but this is all guesses.
You could setup something like opbeat in your code to get actual production info about your code, so you can work out what the problem really is (and speed up production instead of slowing down dev!).
For your local dev environment, you could also try django-silk to get a sense of how many queries your code runs.