[Answered ]-Debugging silent failure in Gunicorn/NGINX/Django

The problem was lack of system resources. I was running the code on a Digital Ocean droplet with 512MB of RAM. I ran htop while making a request to the Django view mentioned in the question, and I saw that RAM usage maxed out right when the Gunicorn worker died. Once I upgraded to a droplet with 1GB of RAM, this problem disappeared. Interesting that the Django dev server handled the request where Gunicorn choked.