It is quite the opposite. It is incredibly inefficient, running hundreds of copies of the exact same code, building up an entire framework of objects to use for a single request, then trashing them all to do it again from scratch on the next request. It is easy for beginners, which is why it is so popular. But that is not the same as being efficient.
So what happens when you configure apache to run 100 processes of your Django code? If 100 clients want to view a web page, how many copies of the request object are floating around?
Or are you talking about parsing the code? At that point, something like APC would help immensely.
Are you seriously trying to compare the same execution model and then expect me to prove one of the two identical options superior? The shared nothing, single process per request execution model is the same as the shared nothing, single process per request execution model. It is not efficient compared to other models like node style non-blocking multi-plexing, or java style multi-threading, or the better options available in languages like haskell, go, clojure and erlang.
It is quite the opposite. It is incredibly inefficient, running hundreds of copies of the exact same code, building up an entire framework of objects to use for a single request, then trashing them all to do it again from scratch on the next request. It is easy for beginners, which is why it is so popular. But that is not the same as being efficient.