By default instance.save() flushes all fields to the database. While this can be handy in some use cases, more often than not you only need to save a subset of fields. Folks have resorted to various workarounds to deal with this behavior, none of which are very pretty.
Luckily Django 1.5 remedies this situation with the new update_fields argument for save(). This not only gives you a minor performance boost, but can also help with certain race conditions.
One thing to note if you use deferred model loading:
“When saving a model fetched through deferred model loading (only() or defer()) only the fields loaded from the DB will get updated. In effect there is an automatic update_fields in this case. If you assign or change any deferred field value, the field will be added to the updated fields.”
