Peterbe.com

I have a commenting system where people can type in a comment and optionally their name and email if they like.
In production, where things are real, the IP address that can be collected are all interestingly different. But when testing this manually on my laptop, since the server is running http://localhost:8000, the request.META.get('REMOTE_ADDR') always becomes 127.0.0.1. Boring! So I fake it. Like this:

import random
from ipaddress import IPv4Address


def _random_ip_address(seed):
    random.seed(seed)
    return str(IPv4Address(random.getrandbits(32)))


...
# Here's the code deep inside the POST handler just before storing 
# the form submission the database.

if settings.DEBUG and metadata.get("REMOTE_ADDR") == "127.0.0.1":
    # Make up a random one!
    metadata["REMOTE_ADDR"] = _random_ip_address(
        str(form.cleaned_data["name"]) + str(form.cleaned_data["email"])
    )

It's pretty rough but it works and makes me happy.

tl;dr; SELECT COUNT(*) FROM (SELECT DISTINCT my_not_unique_indexed_column FROM my_table) t;

I have a table that looks like this:

songsearch=# \d main_songtexthash
            Table "public.main_songtexthash"
  Column   |           Type           | Collation | Nullable |
-----------+--------------------------+-----------+----------+
 id        | integer                  |           | not null |
 text_hash | character varying(32)    |           | not null |
 created   | timestamp with time zone |           | not null |
 modified  | timestamp with time zone |           | not null |
 song_id   | integer                  |           | not null |
Indexes:
    "main_songtexthash_pkey" PRIMARY KEY, btree (id)
    "main_songtexthash_song_id_key" UNIQUE CONSTRAINT, btree (song_id)
    "main_songtexthash_text_hash_c2771f1f" btree (text_hash)
    "main_songtexthash_text_hash_c2771f1f_like" btree (text_hash varchar_pattern_ops)
Foreign-key constraints:
    ...snip...

And the data looks something like this:

songsearch=# select text_hash, song_id from main_songtexthash limit 10;
            text_hash             | song_id
----------------------------------+---------
 6f98e1945e64353bead9d6ab47a7f176 | 2565031
 0c6662363aa4a340fea5efa24c98db76 |  486091
 a25af539b183cbc338409c7acecc6828 |     212
 5aaf561b38c251e7d863aae61fe1363f | 2141077
 6a221df60f7cbb8a4e604f87c9e3aec0 |  245186
 d2a0b5b3b33cdf5e03a75cfbf4963a6f | 1453382
 95c395dd78679120269518b19187ca80 |  981402
 8ab19b32b3be2d592aa69e4417b732cd |  616848
 8ab19b32b3be2d592aa69e4417b732cd |  243393
 01568f1f57aeb7a97e2544978fc93b4c |     333
(10 rows)

If you look carefully, you'll notice that every song_id has a different text_hash except two of them.
Song IDs 616848 and 243393 both have the same text_hash of value 8ab19b32b3be2d592aa69e4417b732cd.

Also, if you imagine this table only has 10 rows, you could quickly and easily conclude that there are 10 different song_id but 9 different distinct text_hash. However, how do you do this counting if the tables are large??

The Wrong Way

songsearch=# select count(distinct text_hash) from main_songtexthash;
  count
---------
 1825983
(1 row)

And the explanation and cost analysis is:

songsearch=# explain analyze select count(distinct text_hash) from main_songtexthash;
                                                             QUERY PLAN
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
 Aggregate  (cost=44942.09..44942.10 rows=1 width=8) (actual time=40029.225..40029.226 rows=1 loops=1)
   ->  Seq Scan on main_songtexthash  (cost=0.00..40233.87 rows=1883287 width=33) (actual time=0.029..193.653 rows=1879521 loops=1)
 Planning Time: 0.059 ms
 Execution Time: 40029.250 ms
(4 rows)

Oh noes! A Sec Scan! Run!

The Right Way

Better explained in this blog post but basically, cutting to the chase, here's how you count on an indexed field:

songsearch=# select count(*) from (select distinct text_hash from main_songtexthash) t;
  count
---------
 1825983
(1 row)

And the explanation and cost analysis is:

songsearch=# explain analyze select count(*) from (select distinct text_hash from main_songtexthash) t;
                                                                                          QUERY PLAN
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
 Aggregate  (cost=193871.20..193871.21 rows=1 width=8) (actual time=4894.555..4894.556 rows=1 loops=1)
   ->  Unique  (cost=0.55..172861.54 rows=1680773 width=33) (actual time=0.075..4704.741 rows=1825983 loops=1)
         ->  Index Only Scan using main_songtexthash_text_hash_c2771f1f on main_songtexthash  (cost=0.55..168153.32 rows=1883287 width=33) (actual time=0.074..4132.822 rows=1879521 loops=1)
               Heap Fetches: 1879521
 Planning Time: 0.082 ms
 Execution Time: 4894.581 ms
(6 rows)

Same exact result but ~5s instead of ~40s. I'll take that, thank you very much.

The Django Way

As a bonus: Django is smart. Here's how they do it:

>>> SongTextHash.objects.values('text_hash').distinct().count()
1825983

And, the SQL it generates to make that count looks very familiar:

SELECT COUNT(*) FROM (SELECT DISTINCT "main_songtexthash"."text_hash" AS Col1 FROM "main_songtexthash") subquery

Conclusion

• Avoid "sequential scans" like the plague if you care about performance (...or not just killing your resources).
• Trust in Django.

This an optimization story that should not surprise anyone using the Django ORM. But I thought I'd share because I have numbers now! The origin of this came from a real requirement. For a given parent model, I'd like to extract the value of the name column of all its child models, and the turn all these name strings into 1 MD5 checksum string.

Variants

The first attempted looked like this:

artist = Artist.objects.get(name="Bad Religion")
names = []
for song in Song.objects.filter(artist=artist):
    names.append(song.name)
return hashlib.md5("".join(names).encode("utf-8")).hexdigest()

The SQL used to generate this is as follows:

SELECT "main_song"."id", "main_song"."artist_id", "main_song"."name", 
"main_song"."text", "main_song"."language", "main_song"."key_phrases", 
"main_song"."popularity", "main_song"."text_length", "main_song"."metadata", 
"main_song"."created", "main_song"."modified", 
"main_song"."has_lastfm_listeners", "main_song"."has_spotify_popularity" 
FROM "main_song" WHERE "main_song"."artist_id" = 22729;

Clearly, I don't need anything but just the name column, version 2:

artist = Artist.objects.get(name="Bad Religion")
names = []
for song in Song.objects.filter(artist=artist).only("name"):
    names.append(song.name)
return hashlib.md5("".join(names).encode("utf-8")).hexdigest()

Now, the SQL used is:

SELECT "main_song"."id", "main_song"."name" 
FROM "main_song" WHERE "main_song"."artist_id" = 22729;

But still, since I don't really need instances of model class Song I can use the .values() method which gives back a list of dictionaries. This is version 3:

names = []
for song in Song.objects.filter(artist=a).values("name"):
    names.append(song["name"])
return hashlib.md5("".join(names).encode("utf-8")).hexdigest()

This time Django figures it doesn't even need the primary key value so it looks like this:

SELECT "main_song"."name" FROM "main_song" WHERE "main_song"."artist_id" = 22729;

Last but not least; there is an even faster one. values_list(). This time it doesn't even bother to map the column name to the value in a dictionary. And since I only need 1 column's value, I can set flat=True. Version 4 looks like this:

names = []
for name in Song.objects.filter(artist=a).values_list("name", flat=True):
    names.append(name)
return hashlib.md5("".join(names).encode("utf-8")).hexdigest()

Same SQL gets used this time as in version 3.

The benchmark

Hopefully this little benchmark script speaks for itself:

from songsearch.main.models import *

import hashlib


def f1(a):
    names = []
    for song in Song.objects.filter(artist=a):
        names.append(song.name)
    return hashlib.md5("".join(names).encode("utf-8")).hexdigest()


def f2(a):
    names = []
    for song in Song.objects.filter(artist=a).only("name"):
        names.append(song.name)
    return hashlib.md5("".join(names).encode("utf-8")).hexdigest()


def f3(a):
    names = []
    for song in Song.objects.filter(artist=a).values("name"):
        names.append(song["name"])
    return hashlib.md5("".join(names).encode("utf-8")).hexdigest()


def f4(a):
    names = []
    for name in Song.objects.filter(artist=a).values_list("name", flat=True):
        names.append(name)
    return hashlib.md5("".join(names).encode("utf-8")).hexdigest()


artist = Artist.objects.get(name="Bad Religion")
print(Song.objects.filter(artist=artist).count())

print(f1(artist) == f2(artist))
print(f2(artist) == f3(artist))
print(f3(artist) == f4(artist))

# Reporting
import time
import random
import statistics

functions = f1, f2, f3, f4
times = {f.__name__: [] for f in functions}

for i in range(500):
    func = random.choice(functions)
    t0 = time.time()
    func(artist)
    t1 = time.time()
    times[func.__name__].append((t1 - t0) * 1000)

for name in sorted(times):
    numbers = times[name]
    print("FUNCTION:", name, "Used", len(numbers), "times")
    print("\tBEST", min(numbers))
    print("\tMEDIAN", statistics.median(numbers))
    print("\tMEAN  ", statistics.mean(numbers))
    print("\tSTDEV ", statistics.stdev(numbers))

I ran this on my PostgreSQL 11.1 on my MacBook Pro with Django 2.1.7. So the database is on localhost.

The results

276
True
True
True
FUNCTION: f1 Used 135 times
    BEST 6.309986114501953
    MEDIAN 7.531881332397461
    MEAN   7.834429211086697
    STDEV  2.03779968066591
FUNCTION: f2 Used 135 times
    BEST 3.039121627807617
    MEDIAN 3.7298202514648438
    MEAN   4.012803678159361
    STDEV  1.8498943539073027
FUNCTION: f3 Used 110 times
    BEST 0.9920597076416016
    MEDIAN 1.4405250549316406
    MEAN   1.5053835782137783
    STDEV  0.3523240470133114
FUNCTION: f4 Used 120 times
    BEST 0.9369850158691406
    MEDIAN 1.3251304626464844
    MEAN   1.4017681280771892
    STDEV  0.3391019435930447

Discussion

I guess the hashlib.md5("".join(names).encode("utf-8")).hexdigest() stuff is a bit "off-topic" but I checked and it's roughly 300 times faster than building up the names list.

It's clearly better to ask less of Python and PostgreSQL to get a better total time. No surprise there. What was interesting was the proportion of these differences. Memorize that and you'll be better equipped if it's worth the hassle of not using the Django ORM in the most basic form.

Also, do take note that this is only relevant in when dealing with many records. The slowest variant (f1) takes, on average, 7 milliseconds.

Summarizing the difference with percentages compared to the fastest variant:

• f1 - 573% slower
• f2 - 225% slower
• f3 - 6% slower
• f4 - 0% slower

UPDATE Feb 25 2019

James suggested, although a bit "missing the point", that it could be even faster if all the aggregation is pushed into the PostgreSQL server and then the only thing that needs to transfer from PostgreSQL to Python is the final result.

By the way, name column in this particular benchmark, when concatenated into one big string, is ~4KB. So, with variant f5 it only needs to transfer 32 bytes which will/would make a bigger difference if the network latency is higher.

Here's the whole script: https://gist.github.com/peterbe/b2b7ed95d422ab25a65639cb8412e75e

And the results:

276
True
True
True
False
False
FUNCTION: f1 Used 92 times
    BEST 5.928993225097656
    MEDIAN 7.311463356018066
    MEAN   7.594626882801885
    STDEV  2.2027017044658423
FUNCTION: f2 Used 75 times
    BEST 2.878904342651367
    MEDIAN 3.3979415893554688
    MEAN   3.4774907430013022
    STDEV  0.5120246550765524
FUNCTION: f3 Used 88 times
    BEST 0.9310245513916016
    MEDIAN 1.1944770812988281
    MEAN   1.3105544176968662
    STDEV  0.35922655625999383
FUNCTION: f4 Used 71 times
    BEST 0.7879734039306641
    MEDIAN 1.1661052703857422
    MEAN   1.2262606284987758
    STDEV  0.3561764250427344
FUNCTION: f5 Used 90 times
    BEST 0.7929801940917969
    MEDIAN 1.0334253311157227
    MEAN   1.1836051940917969
    STDEV  0.4001442703048186
FUNCTION: f6 Used 84 times
    BEST 0.80108642578125
    MEDIAN 1.1119842529296875
    MEAN   1.2281338373819988
    STDEV  0.37146893005516973

Result: f5 is takes 0.793ms and (the previous "winner") f4 takes 0.788ms.

I'm not entirely sure why f5 isn't faster but I suspect it's because the dataset is too small for it all to matter.

Compare:

songsearch=# explain analyze SELECT "main_song"."name" FROM "main_song" WHERE "main_song"."artist_id" = 22729;
                                                             QUERY PLAN
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
 Index Scan using main_song_ca949605 on main_song  (cost=0.43..229.33 rows=56 width=16) (actual time=0.014..0.208 rows=276 loops=1)
   Index Cond: (artist_id = 22729)
 Planning Time: 0.113 ms
 Execution Time: 0.242 ms
(4 rows)

with...

songsearch=# explain analyze SELECT md5(STRING_AGG("main_song"."name", '')) AS "names_hash" FROM "main_song" WHERE "main_song"."artist_id" = 22729;
                                                                QUERY PLAN
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
 Aggregate  (cost=229.47..229.48 rows=1 width=32) (actual time=0.278..0.278 rows=1 loops=1)
   ->  Index Scan using main_song_ca949605 on main_song  (cost=0.43..229.33 rows=56 width=16) (actual time=0.019..0.204 rows=276 loops=1)
         Index Cond: (artist_id = 22729)
 Planning Time: 0.115 ms
 Execution Time: 0.315 ms
(5 rows)

I ran these two SQL statements about 100 times each and recorded their best possible execution times:

1) The plain SELECT - 0.99ms
2) The STRING_AGG - 1.06ms

So that accounts from ~0.1ms difference only! Which kinda matches the results seen above. All in all, I think the dataset is too small to demonstrate this technique. But, considering the chance that the complexity might not be linear with the performance benefit, it's still interesting.

Even though this tangent is a big off-topic, it is often a great idea to push as much work into the database as you can if applicable. Especially if it means you can transfer a lot less data eventually.

tl;dr; If you use the django.views.decorators.cache.cache_control decorator, consider this one instead to change the max_age depending on the request.

I had/have a Django view function that looks something like this:

@cache_control(public=True, max_age=60 * 60)
def home(request, oc=None, page=1):
    ...

But, that number 60 * 60 I really needed it to be different depending on the request parameters. For example, that oc=None, if that's not None I know the page's Cache-Control header can and should be different.

So I wrote this decorator:

from django.utils.cache import patch_cache_control


def variable_cache_control(**kwargs):
    """Same as django.views.decorators.cache.cache_control except this one will
    allow the `max_age` parameter be a callable.
    """

    def _cache_controller(viewfunc):
        @functools.wraps(viewfunc)
        def _cache_controlled(request, *args, **kw):
            response = viewfunc(request, *args, **kw)
            copied = kwargs
            if kwargs.get("max_age") and callable(kwargs["max_age"]):
                max_age = kwargs["max_age"](request, *args, **kw)
                # Can't re-use, have to create a shallow clone.
                copied = dict(kwargs, max_age=max_age)
            patch_cache_control(response, **copied)
            return response

        return _cache_controlled

    return _cache_controller

Now, I can do this instead:

def _best_max_age(req, oc=None, **kwargs):
    max_age = 60 * 60
    if oc:
        max_age *= 10
    return max_age

@variable_cache_control(public=True, max_age=_best_max_age)
def home(request, oc=None, page=1):
    ...

I hope it inspires.

tl;dr; I wrote my own extension to django-pipeline that uses Zopfli to create .gz files from static assets collected in Django. Here's the code.

Nginx and Gzip

What I wanted was to continue to use django-pipeline which does a great job of reading a settings.BUNDLES setting and generating things like /static/js/myapp.min.a206ec6bd8c7.js. It has configurable options to not just make those files but also generate /static/js/myapp.min.a206ec6bd8c7.js.gz which means that with gzip_static in Nginx, Nginx doesn't have to Gzip compress static files on-the-fly but can basically just read it from disk. Nginx doesn't care how the file got there but an immediate advantage of preparing the file on disk is that the compression can be higher (smaller .gz files). That means smaller responses to be sent to the client and less CPU work needed from Nginx. Your job is to set gzip_static on; in your Nginx config (per location) and make sure every compressable file exists on disk with the same name but with the .gz suffix.

In other words, when the client does GET https://example.com/static/foo.js Nginx quickly does a read on the file system to see if there exists a ROOT/static/foo.js.gz and if so, return that. If the files doesn't exist, and you have gzip on; in your config, Nginx will read the ROOT/static/foo.js into memory, compress it (usually with a lower compression level) and return that. Nginx takes care of figuring out whether to do this, at all, dynamically by reading the Accept-Encoding header from the request.

Zopfli

The best solution today to generate these .gz files is Zopfli. Zopfli is slower than good old regular gzip but the files get smaller. To manually compress a file you can install the zopfli executable (e.g. brew install zopfli or apt install zopfli) and then run zopfli $ROOT/static/foo.js which creates a $ROOT/static/foo.js.gz file.

So your task is to build some pipelining code that generates .gz version of every static file your Django server creates.
At first I tried django-static-compress which has an extension to regular Django staticfiles storage. The default staticfiles storage is django.contrib.staticfiles.storage.StaticFilesStorage and that's what django-static-compress extends.

But I wanted more. I wanted all the good bits from django-pipeline (minification, hashes in filenames, concatenation, etc.) Also, in django-static-compress you can't control the parameters to zopfli such as the number of iterations. And with django-static-compress you have to install Brotli which I can't use because I don't want to compile my own Nginx.

Solution

So I wrote my own little mashup. I took some ideas from how django-pipeline does regular gzip compression as a post-process step. And in my case, I never want to bother with any of the other files that are put into the settings.STATIC_ROOT directory from the collectstatic command.

Here's my implementation: peterbecom.storage.ZopfliPipelineCachedStorage. Check it out. It's very tailored to my personal preferences and usecase but it works great. To use it, I have this in my settings.py: STATICFILES_STORAGE = "peterbecom.storage.ZopfliPipelineCachedStorage"

I know what you're thinking

Why not try to get this into django-pipeline or into django-compress-static. The answer is frankly laziness. Hopefully someone else can pick up this task. I have fewer and fewer projects where I use Django to handle static files. These days most of my projects are single-page-apps that are 100% static and using Django for XHR requests to get the data.

Here's the code. It's quick-n-dirty but it works wonderfully:

import functools
import hashlib

from django.core.cache import cache
from django.utils.encoding import force_bytes


def lock_decorator(key_maker=None):
    """
    When you want to lock a function from more than 1 call at a time.
    """

    def decorator(func):
        @functools.wraps(func)
        def inner(*args, **kwargs):
            if key_maker:
                key = key_maker(*args, **kwargs)
            else:
                key = str(args) + str(kwargs)
            lock_key = hashlib.md5(force_bytes(key)).hexdigest()
            with cache.lock(lock_key):
                return func(*args, **kwargs)

        return inner

    return decorator

How To Use It

This has saved my bacon more than once. I use it on functions that really need to be made synchronous. For example, suppose you have a function like this:

def fetch_remote_thing(name):
    try:
        return Thing.objects.get(name=name).result
    except Thing.DoesNotExist:
        # Need to go out and fetch this
        result = some_internet_fetching(name)  # Assume this is sloooow
        Thing.objects.create(name=name, result=result)
        return result

That function is quite dangerous because if executed by two concurrent web requests for example, they will trigger
two "identical" calls to some_internet_fetching and if the database didn't have the name already, it will most likely trigger two calls to Thing.objects.create(name=name, ...) which could lead to integrity errors or if it doesn't the whole function breaks down because it assumes that there is only 1 or 0 of these Thing records.

Easy to solve, just add the lock_decorator:

@lock_decorator()
def fetch_remote_thing(name):
    try:
        return Thing.objects.get(name=name).result
    except Thing.DoesNotExist:
        # Need to go out and fetch this
        result = some_internet_fetching(name)  # Assume this is sloooow
        Thing.objects.create(name=name, result=result)
        return result

Now, thanks to Redis distributed locks, the function is always allowed to finish before it starts another one. All the hairy locking (in particular, the waiting) is implemented deep down in Redis which is rock solid.

Bonus Usage

Another use that has also saved my bacon is functions that aren't necessarily called with the same input argument but each call is so resource intensive that you want to make sure it only does one of these at a time. Suppose you have a Django view function that does some resource intensive work and you want to stagger the calls so that it only runs it one at a time. Like this for example:

def api_stats_calculations(request, part):
    if part == 'users-per-month':
        data = _calculate_users_per_month()  # expensive
    elif part == 'pageviews-per-week':
        data = _calculate_pageviews_per_week()  # intensive
    elif part == 'downloads-per-day':
        data = _calculate_download_per_day()  # slow
    elif you == 'get' and the == 'idea':
        ...

    return http.JsonResponse({'data': data})

If you just put @lock_decorator() on this Django view function, and you have some (almost) concurrent calls to this function, for example from a uWSGI server running with threads and multiple processes, then it will not synchronize the calls.

The solution to this is to write your own function for generating the lock key, like this for example:

@lock_decorator(
    key_maker=lamnbda request, part: 'api_stats_calculations'
)
def api_stats_calculations(request, part):
    if part == 'users-per-month':
        data = _calculate_users_per_month()  # expensive
    elif part == 'pageviews-per-week':
        data = _calculate_pageviews_per_week()  # intensive
    elif part == 'downloads-per-day':
        data = _calculate_download_per_day()  # slow
    elif you == 'get' and the == 'idea':
        ...

    return http.JsonResponse({'data': data})

Now it works.

How Time-Expensive Is It?

Perhaps you worry that 99% of your calls to the function don't have the problem of calling the function concurrently. How much is this overhead of this lock costing you? I wondered that too and set up a simple stress test where I wrote a really simple Django view function. It looked something like this:

@lock_decorator(key_maker=lambda request: 'samekey')
def sample_view_function(request):
    return http.HttpResponse('Ok\n')

I started a Django server with uWSGI with multiple processors and threads enabled. Then I bombarded this function with a simple concurrent stress test and observed the requests per minute. The cost was extremely tiny and almost negligable (compared to not using the lock decorator). Granted, in this test I used Redis on redis://localhost:6379/0 but generally the conclusion was that the call is extremely fast and not something to worry too much about. But your mileage may vary so do your own experiments for your context.

What's Needed

You need to use django-redis as your Django cache backend. I've blogged before about using django-redis, for example Fastest cache backend possible for Django and Fastest Redis configuration for Django.

django-html-validator is a Django project that can validate your generated HTML. It does so by sending the HTML to https://html5.validator.nu/ or you can start your own Java server locally with vnu.jar from here. The output is that you can have validation errors printed to stdout or you can have them put as .txt files in a temporary directory. You can also include it in your test suite and make it so that tests fail if invalid HTML is generated during rendering in Django unit tests.

The project seems to have become a lot more popular than I thought it would. It started as a one-evening-hack and because there was interest I wrapped it up in a proper project with "docs" and set up CI for future contributions.

I kinda of forgot the project since almost all my current projects generate JSON on the server and generates the DOM on-the-fly with client-side JavaScript but apparently a lot of issues and PRs were filed related to making it work in Django 2.x. So I took the time last night to tidy up the tox.ini etc. and the necessary compatibility fixes to make it work with but Django 1.8 up to Django 2.1. Pull request here.

Thank you all who contributed! I'll try to make a better job noticing filed issues in the future.

I use this a lot. It has served me very well. The code:

import hashlib
import functools

import markus  # optional
from django.core.cache import cache
from django import http
from django.utils.encoding import force_bytes, iri_to_uri

metrics = markus.get_metrics(__name__)  # optional


def json_response_cache_page_decorator(seconds):
    """Cache only when there's a healthy http.JsonResponse response."""

    def decorator(func):

        @functools.wraps(func)
        def inner(request, *args, **kwargs):
            cache_key = 'json_response_cache:{}:{}'.format(
                func.__name__,
                hashlib.md5(force_bytes(iri_to_uri(
                    request.build_absolute_uri()
                ))).hexdigest()
            )
            content = cache.get(cache_key)
            if content is not None:

                # metrics is optional
                metrics.incr(
                    'json_response_cache_hit',
                    tags=['view:{}'.format(func.__name__)]
                )

                return http.HttpResponse(
                    content,
                    content_type='application/json'
                )
            response = func(request, *args, **kwargs)
            if (
                isinstance(response, http.JsonResponse) and
                response.status_code in (200, 304)
            ):
                cache.set(cache_key, response.content, seconds)
            return response

        return inner

    return decorator

To use it simply add to Django view functions that might return a http.JsonResponse. For example, something like this:

@json_response_cache_page_decorator(60)
def search(request):
    q = request.GET.get('q')
    if not q:
        return http.HttpResponseBadRequest('no q')
    results = search_database(q)
    return http.JsonResponse({
        'results': results,
    })

The reasons I use this instead of django.views.decorators.cache.cache_page() is because of a couple of reasons.

• cache_page generates cache keys that don't contain the view function name.
• cache_page tries to cache the whole http.HttpResponse instance which can't be serialized if you use the msgpack serializer.
• cache_page also sends Cache-Control headers which is not always what you want.
• Not possible to inject your own custom code such as my usage of metrics.

Disclaimer: This snippet of code comes from a side-project that has a very specific set of requirements. They're rather unique to that project and I have a full picture of the needs. E.g. I know what specific headers matter and don't matter. Your project might be different. For example, perhaps you don't have markus to handle your metrics. Or perhaps you need to re-write the query string for something to normalize the cache key differently. Point being, take the snippet of code as inspiration when you too find that django.views.decorators.cache.cache_page() isn't good enough for your Django view functions.

By default, when you hook up a model to Django REST Framework and run a query in JSON format, what you get is a list. E.g.

For GET localhost:8000/api/mymodel/

[
  {"id": 1, "name": "Foo"},
  {"id": 2, "name": "Bar"},
  {"id": 3, "name": "Baz"}
]

This isn't great because there's no good way to include other auxiliary data points that are relevant to this query. In Elasticsearch you get something like this:

{
  "took": 106,
  "timed_out": false,
  "_shards": {},
  "hits": {
    "total": 0,
    "hits": [],
    "max_score": 1
  }
}

Another key is that perhaps today you can't think of any immediate reason why you want to include some additonal meta data about the query, but perhaps some day you will.

The way to solve this in Django REST Framework is to override the list function in your Viewset classes.

Before

# views.py
# views.py
from rest_framework import viewsets

class BlogpostViewSet(viewsets.ModelViewSet):
    queryset = Blogpost.objects.all().order_by('date')
    serializer_class = serializers.BlogpostSerializer

After

# views.py
from rest_framework import viewsets

class BlogpostViewSet(viewsets.ModelViewSet):
    queryset = Blogpost.objects.all().order_by('date')
    serializer_class = serializers.BlogpostSerializer

    def list(self, request, *args, **kwargs):
        response = super().list(request, *args, **kwargs)
        # Where the magic happens!
        return response

Now, to re-wrap that, the response.data is a OrderedDict which you can change. Here's one way to do it:

# views.py
from rest_framework import viewsets

class BlogpostViewSet(viewsets.ModelViewSet):
    queryset = Blogpost.objects.all().order_by('date')
    serializer_class = serializers.BlogpostSerializer

    def list(self, request, *args, **kwargs):
        response = super().list(request, *args, **kwargs)
        response.data = {
            'hits': response.data,
        }
        return response

And if you want to do the same the "detail API" where you retrieve a single model instance, you can add an override to the retrieve method:

def retrieve(self, request, *args, **kwargs):
    response = super().retrieve(request, *args, **kwargs)
    response.data = {
        'hit': response.data,
    }
    return response

That's it. Perhaps it's personal preference but if you, like me, prefers this style, this is how you do it. I like namespacing things instead of dealing with raw lists.

"Namespaces are one honking great idea -- let's do more of those!"

From import this

Note! This works equally when you enable pagination. Enabling pagination immediately changes the main result from a list to a dictionary. I.e. Instead of...

[
  {"id": 1, "name": "Foo"},
  {"id": 2, "name": "Bar"},
  {"id": 3, "name": "Baz"}
]

you now get...

{
  "count": 3,
  "next": null,
  "previous": null,
  "items": [
    {"id": 1, "name": "Foo"},
    {"id": 2, "name": "Bar"},
    {"id": 3, "name": "Baz"}
  ]
}

So if you apply the "trick" mentioned in this blog post you end up with...:

{
  "hits": {
    "count": 3,
    "next": null,
    "previous": null,
    "items": [
      {"id": 1, "name": "Foo"},
      {"id": 2, "name": "Bar"},
      {"id": 3, "name": "Baz"}
    ]
  }
}

The basic setup

Suppose you have these models:

from django.db import models


class Category(models.Model):
    name = models.CharField(max_length=100)


class Blogpost(models.Model):
    title = models.CharField(max_length=100)
    categories = models.ManyToManyField(Category)

Suppose you hook these up Django REST Framework and list all Blogpost items. Something like this:

# urls.py
from rest_framework import routers
from . import views


router = routers.DefaultRouter()
router.register(r'blogposts', views.BlogpostViewSet)

# views.py
from rest_framework import viewsets

class BlogpostViewSet(viewsets.ModelViewSet):
    queryset = Blogpost.objects.all().order_by('date')
    serializer_class = serializers.BlogpostSerializer

What's the problem?

Then, if you execute this list (e.g. curl http://localhost:8000/api/blogposts/) what will happen, on the database, is something like this:

SELECT "app_blogpost"."id", "app_blogpost"."title" FROM "app_blogpost";

SELECT "app_category"."id", "app_category"."name" FROM "app_category" INNER JOIN "app_blogpost_categories" ON ("app_category"."id" = "app_blogpost_categories"."category_id") WHERE "app_blogpost_categories"."blogpost_id" = 1025;
SELECT "app_category"."id", "app_category"."name" FROM "app_category" INNER JOIN "app_blogpost_categories" ON ("app_category"."id" = "app_blogpost_categories"."category_id") WHERE "app_blogpost_categories"."blogpost_id" = 193;
SELECT "app_category"."id", "app_category"."name" FROM "app_category" INNER JOIN "app_blogpost_categories" ON ("app_category"."id" = "app_blogpost_categories"."category_id") WHERE "app_blogpost_categories"."blogpost_id" = 757;
SELECT "app_category"."id", "app_category"."name" FROM "app_category" INNER JOIN "app_blogpost_categories" ON ("app_category"."id" = "app_blogpost_categories"."category_id") WHERE "app_blogpost_categories"."blogpost_id" = 853;
SELECT "app_category"."id", "app_category"."name" FROM "app_category" INNER JOIN "app_blogpost_categories" ON ("app_category"."id" = "app_blogpost_categories"."category_id") WHERE "app_blogpost_categories"."blogpost_id" = 1116;
SELECT "app_category"."id", "app_category"."name" FROM "app_category" INNER JOIN "app_blogpost_categories" ON ("app_category"."id" = "app_blogpost_categories"."category_id") WHERE "app_blogpost_categories"."blogpost_id" = 1126;
SELECT "app_category"."id", "app_category"."name" FROM "app_category" INNER JOIN "app_blogpost_categories" ON ("app_category"."id" = "app_blogpost_categories"."category_id") WHERE "app_blogpost_categories"."blogpost_id" = 964;
SELECT "app_category"."id", "app_category"."name" FROM "app_category" INNER JOIN "app_blogpost_categories" ON ("app_category"."id" = "app_blogpost_categories"."category_id") WHERE "app_blogpost_categories"."blogpost_id" = 591;
SELECT "app_category"."id", "app_category"."name" FROM "app_category" INNER JOIN "app_blogpost_categories" ON ("app_category"."id" = "app_blogpost_categories"."category_id") WHERE "app_blogpost_categories"."blogpost_id" = 1112;
SELECT "app_category"."id", "app_category"."name" FROM "app_category" INNER JOIN "app_blogpost_categories" ON ("app_category"."id" = "app_blogpost_categories"."category_id") WHERE "app_blogpost_categories"."blogpost_id" = 1034;
...

Obviously, it depends on how you define that serializers.BlogpostSerializer class, but basically, as it loops over the Blogpost, for each and every one, it needs to make a query to the many-to-many table (app_blogpost_categories in this example).

That's not going to be performant. In fact, it might be dangerous on your database if the query of blogposts gets big, like requesting a 100 or 1,000 records. Fetching 1,000 rows from the app_blogpost table might be cheap'ish but doing 1,000 selects with JOIN is never going to be cheap. It adds up horribly.

How you solve it

The trick is to only do 1 query on the many-to-many field's table, 1 query on the app_blogpost table and 1 query on the app_category table.

First you have to override the ViewSet.list method. Then, in there you can do exactly what you need.

Here's the framework for this change:

# views.py
from rest_framework import viewsets

class BlogpostViewSet(viewsets.ModelViewSet):
    # queryset = Blogpost.objects.all().order_by('date')
    serializer_class = serializers.BlogpostSerializer

    def get_queryset(self):
        # Chances are, you're doing something more advanced here 
        # like filtering.
        Blogpost.objects.all().order_by('date')

    def list(self, request, *args, **kwargs):
        response = super().list(request, *args, **kwargs)
        # Where the magic happens!

        return response

Next, we need to make a mapping of all Category.id -1-> Category.name. But we want to make sure we do only on the categories that are involved in the Blogpost records that matter. You could do something like this:

category_names = {}
for category in Category.objects.all():
    category_names[category.id] = category.name

But to avoid doing a lookup of category names for those you never need, use the query set on Blogpost. I.e.

qs = self.get_queryset()
all_categories = Category.objects.filter(
    id__in=Blogpost.categories.through.objects.filter(
        blogpost__in=qs
    ).values('category_id')
)
category_names = {}
for category in all_categories:
    category_names[category.id] = category.name

Now you have a dictionary of all the Category IDs that matter.

Note! The above "optimization" assumes that it's worth it. Meaning, if the number of Category records in your database is huge, and the Blogpost queryset is very filtered, then it's worth only extracting a subset. Alternatively, if you only have like 100 different categories in your database, just do the first variant were you look them up "simplestly" without any fancy joins.

Next, is the mapping of Blogpost.id -N-> Category.name. To do that you need to build up a dictionary (int to list of strings). Like this:

categories_map = defaultdict(list)
for m2m in Blogpost.categories.through.objects.filter(blogpost__in=qs):
    categories_map[m2m.blogpost_id].append(
        category_names[m2m.category_id]
    )

So what we have now is a dictionary whose keys are the IDs in self.get_queryset() and each value is a list of a strings. E.g. ['Category X', 'Category Z'] etc.

Lastly, we need to put these back into the serialized response. This feels a little hackish but it works:

for each in response.data:
    each['categories'] = categories_map.get(each['id'], [])

The whole solution looks something like this:

# views.py
from rest_framework import viewsets

class BlogpostViewSet(viewsets.ModelViewSet):
    # queryset = Blogpost.objects.all().order_by('date')
    serializer_class = serializers.BlogpostSerializer

    def get_queryset(self):
        # Chances are, you're doing something more advanced here 
        # like filtering.
        Blogpost.objects.all().order_by('date')

    def list(self, request, *args, **kwargs):
        response = super().list(request, *args, **kwargs)
        qs = self.get_queryset()
        all_categories = Category.objects.filter(
            id__in=Blogpost.categories.through.objects.filter(
                blogpost__in=qs
            ).values('category_id')
        )
        category_names = {}
        for category in all_categories:
            category_names[category.id] = category.name

        categories_map = defaultdict(list)
        for m2m in Blogpost.categories.through.objects.filter(blogpost__in=qs):
            categories_map[m2m.blogpost_id].append(
                category_names[m2m.category_id]
            )

        for each in response.data:
            each['categories'] = categories_map.get(each['id'], [])

        return response

It's arguably not very pretty but doing 3 tight queries instead of doing as many queries as you have records is much better. O(c) is better than O(n).

Discussion

Perhaps the best solution is to not run into this problem. Like, don't serialize any many-to-many fields.

Or, if you use pagination very conservatively, and only allow like 10 items per page then it won't be so expensive to do one query per every many-to-many field.