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As per this answer to Can I gzip JavaScript and CSS files in Django?:

Your CSS and JS should not be going through Django on your production system. You need to configure Apache (or Nginx, or whatever) to serve these, and when you do so you'll be able to set up gzip compression there, rather than in Django.

The answers to that question don't explain the reason for this requirement/advice. Is it just a good practice for speed to have static content (images/CSS/JS) served from a different server? Or is there more to it?

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Apache and Nginx are faster than Django (because they do much less and much simpler things). So serving CSS and JS with Django is a waste of resources.

Although "should" is too strong here, IMO. "Should, if you have high traffic", rather.

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Also. The slowest part of a web transaction is the desktop. Do you want the (slow) Django instance pushing down endless streams of static content? Or do you want limit the (slow) Django instance to pushing the important dynamic HTML page?
Admittedly, the django static module from django.views.static is good enough for most serving, and chances are if you get more traffic than they're able to deal with, you've either got a rather inefficient app, or you'll have the resources to deal with moving to serve static files separately.
@sleepynate: "good enough for most serving". We didn't find that to be the case. We found that having Django do very, very little and having Apache do as much as possible made things more scalable. Python is slow compared to Apache.
The asker here doesn't understand why in production, one should move away from d.v.static. My point was that by the time he has enough people using his app to tell the difference, he'll likely have the resources (separate server) to deal with it.
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The content served by a Web server can be broadly categorized in to two categories.

  1. Static
  2. Dynamic

Static files (CSS/JS/Img...) generally won't change (i.e, they can be read from disk and send to client. (No pre processing required before pushing)

Dynamic files (your dynamic html pages) usually needs to be processed in various ways (db data + form process + messages ...) and send to client.

When a thing is not changing and remain same for any user, don't assign that job to web framework (its additional burden), let the web server handle it.

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In production environments you already have real http server which connects to django (either via mod_python, fcgi or wsgi) so its just common sense to serve files directly from it.

It will send responses faster:

  • when you serve static file via properly configured apache or nginx overhead will be minimal. Upon request server checks if file in specified path exists then it sends it to browser (adding some headers of course).
  • when you serve static file via django configured behind apache or nginx firstly web server connects to django, then django handles things way more complex:
    • creates request object,
    • runs urlpatterns REGEXP matches until it finds lines responsible for static,
    • runs some static serving code which sends it back to user...

It will consume much less resources:

  • each django process consumes LOT of memory, think like 10 times than same way configured apache process serving same static file,

It will scale better:

  • properly configured nginx can handle 100x more request consuming much less CPU & memory...

It can be outsourced:

  • although it is written you need to configure apache or nginx you may not - you can outsource those files to services like Amazon S3 or Google APIs so js & css will be "closer" to users and in case services like Google APIs there is chance that library you want to add (like jQuery) is already cached in user browser.

All such things added together will simply make your site load faster.

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