David Cramer's Blog

Python, Django, and Scale.

Improving GZipMiddleware in Django

One issue we had come up over at iBegin lately, is the fact that GZipMiddleware tries to encode ALL responses (with a few minor exceptions). In our cases, we sometimes stream actual binary files over the response. Doing this with the standard middleware causes a unicode error as it’s trying to encode all of the information before gzipping it.

So to fix this, we simply created a slightly improved middleware to handle the content types a bit better:

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from django.middleware.gzip import GZipMiddleware

<p>class ImprovedGZipMiddleware(GZipMiddleware):
"""Will GZip the content if it's not text/*, xml, or a javascript content type."""
def process_response(self, request, response):
ctype = response.get('Content-Type', '').lower()
if not ctype.startswith('text/')\
or 'javascript' in ctype\
or 'xml' in ctype:
return response
return super(ImprovedGZipMiddleware, self).process_response(request, response)

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