Making Django development server faster at serving static media

Consider using mod_wsgi instead, and having httpd handle the static media.

Development server is simple unsafe single-threaded application, so you cannot do much.

One trick you could try is to redirect /site_media to second development server, but this is ugly and probably wouldn't help that much. So you could try bundling/compressing multiple assets into one css/js (e.g. using YUI Compressor).

And in any case, you should have separate static media server, that can serve multiple assets at once.