Does django provide a system for caching the nodelist? In Jinja I've added a loader which cpickles the nodelist using protocol 2 which is very fast because you don't have to parse it again.
Additonally you can store the templates in an global dict like in the solution proposed in that thread: http://groups.google.com/group/django-users/browse_thread/thread/40ecfffa8aa85a21/759da88e6d075ad7
