You probably know this already, but if you're using (or are amenable to using) uwsgi for managing your workers, there's an option[1] that can control whether your application code is loaded before or after fork() is called.

I've run into the exact issue you've described; the --lazy-apps solution may be slightly more resource intensive (since you maintain N copies of the application in memory), but ends up being much nicer to reason about.

1. http://uwsgi-docs.readthedocs.org/en/latest/articles/TheArtO...