Serving large files ( with high loads ) in Django

Your opening of the image loads it in memory and this is what causes the increase in load under heavy use. As posted by Martin the real solution is to serve the file directly.

Here is another approach, which will stream your file in chunks without loading it in memory.

import os
import mimetypes

from wsgiref.util import FileWrapper

from django.http import StreamingHttpResponse


def download_file(request):
    the_file = "/some/file/name.png"
    filename = os.path.basename(the_file)
    chunk_size = 8192
    response = StreamingHttpResponse(
        FileWrapper(
            open(the_file, "rb"),
            chunk_size,
        ),
        content_type=mimetypes.guess_type(the_file)[0],
    )
    response["Content-Length"] = os.path.getsize(the_file)
    response["Content-Disposition"] = f"attachment; filename={filename}"
    return response