16đź‘Ť
Django’s ORM manages database connections in thread-local variables. So each different thread accessing the ORM will create its own connection. You can see that in the first few lines of django/db/backends/__init__.py.
If you want to limit the number of database connections made, you must limit the number of different threads that actually access the ORM. A solution could be to implement a service that delegates ORM requests to a pool of dedicated ORM threads. To transmit the requests and their results from and to other threads you will have to implement some sort of message passing mechanism. Since this is a typical producer/consumer problem, the Python docs about threading should give some hints how to achieve this.
Edit: I’ve just googled for “django connection pooling”. There are many people who complain that Django does not provide a proper connection pool. Some of them managed to integrate a separate pooling package. For PostgreSQL, I would take a look at the pgpool middleware.