Django + S3 (boto) + Sorl Thumbnail: Suggestions for optimisation

Question

I am using S3 storage backend across a Django site I am developing, both to reduce load from the EC2 server(s), and to allow multiple webservers (redundancy, load balancing)

Answer 1

You can use Sorlery. It combines sorl and celery to create thumbnails via workers. It's very careful not to do any filesystem access outside of the worker thread.

The thumbnail returned immediately (before the worker has had a chance) can be controlled by setting your THUMBNAIL_DUMMY_SOURCE to an appropriate placeholder.

The job is created the first time the thumbnail is requested, subsequent requests are served the dummy image until the worker thread completes.