Django FileResponse - How to speed up file download - django

Question

I have a setup that lets users download files that are stored in the DB as BYTEA data. Everything works OK, except the download speed is very slow...it seems to download in 33KB chunks, one chunk per second.
Is there a setting I can specify to speed this up?
views.py
from django.http import FileResponse
def getFileResponse(filedata, filename, filesize, contenttype):
response = FileResponse(filedata, content_type=contenttype)
response['Content-Disposition'] = 'attachment; filename=%s' % filename
response['Content-Length'] = filesize
return response
return getFileResponse(
filedata = myfile.filedata, # Binary data from DB
filename = myfile.filename + myfile.fileextension,
filesize = myfile.filesize,
contenttype = myfile.filetype
)
Previously, I had the binary data returned as an HttpResponse and it downloaded like a normal file, with normal speeds. This worked fine locally, but when I pushed to Heroku, it wouldn't download the file -- instead displaying <Memory at XXX> in the download file.
And another side issue...when I include a text file with non-ASCII data (i.e. á), I get an error as well:
UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode characters...: ordinal not in range(128)
How can I handle files with Unicode data?
Update
Anyone know why the download speed gets so slow when changing from HTTPResponse to FileResponse? Or alternatively, why the HTTPResponse to return a file doesn't work on Heroku?
Update - Google Drive
I re-worked my application and hooked it up with a Google Drive back-end for serving files. It employs BytesIO() suggested by Eric below:
def download_file(self, fileid, mimetype=None):
# Get binary file data
request = self.get_file(fileid=fileid, mediaflag=True)
stream = io.BytesIO()
downloader = MediaIoBaseDownload(stream, request)
done = False
# Retry if we received HTTPError
for retry in range(0, 5):
try:
while done is False:
status, done = downloader.next_chunk()
print("Download %d%%." % int(status.progress() * 100))
return stream.getvalue()
except (HTTPError) as error:
return ('API error: {}. Try # {} failed.'.format(error.response, retry))

Answer 1

I think the difference you observe between HttpResponse vs. FileResponse is caused by the spec: https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-3333/#buffering-and-streaming
In your previous code, an HttpResponse was created with one huge byte string containing your whole file, and the first iteration pass returned the complete response body. With a a FileResponse, the file is iterated in chunks (of 4kb, 8kb or other depending on your WSGI app server), which (I think) are streamed immediately upstream (to the reverse proxy then client), which may add overhead (more communication over process boundaries?).
It would help to know the app server used (uwsgi, gunicorn, waitress, other) and its relevant config. Also more details about the heroku error in case that can be solved!

Answer 2

why you store whole file in database.
best case is to store file on hard and store only path on database
then according to your web server you can let web server to serve file.
web services serve file better than Django.
if files have no access check store them on media
if your files have access control you according to your web server you can use some response headers
if you use Nginx must use X-Accel-Redirect and use any alternative on other web services tutorial on https://wellfire.co/learn/nginx-django-x-accel-redirects/