Investigating Django Admin Image Upload Performance Issues

Based on your description, you're experiencing performance issues with larger image uploads in the Django admin interface. This could be related to known Django vulnerabilities regarding image file processing.

Possible Causes

1. Image Processing Denial-of-Service: Your issue sounds similar to the CVE-2012-3444 vulnerability, which involves denial-of-service via large image files. While your Django version is likely newer than the affected versions (1.3 and 1.4), the underlying issue could be similar.

2. File Upload Denial-of-Service: There's also CVE-2014-0481 which pertains to file upload denial of service in Django versions 1.4 through 1.7.

Areas to Investigate

1. Image Processing: Django may be performing resource-intensive operations on uploaded images:

   • Check if you have any image processing in your model's save() method
   • Look for any signals that might trigger on image upload
   • Check if you're using any third-party packages for image handling

2. Server Configuration:

   • Check Passenger's timeout settings
   • Verify memory limits for your application
   • Look at CPU usage during uploads

3. Django Settings:

   • Check your FILE_UPLOAD_MAX_MEMORY_SIZE setting
   • Review your media handling configuration

4. Enhanced Logging:

   • Add more detailed logging to your Django settings:

PYTHONCopied
LOGGING = {
    'version': 1,
    'disable_existing_loggers': False,
    'handlers': {
        'file': {
            'level': 'DEBUG',
            'class': 'logging.FileHandler',
            'filename': '/path/to/django_debug.log',
        },
    },
    'loggers': {
        'django': {
            'handlers': ['file'],
            'level': 'DEBUG',
            'propagate': True,
        },
        'django.request': {
            'handlers': ['file'],
            'level': 'DEBUG',
            'propagate': True,
        },
    },
}

5. Browser Network Monitoring:

   • Use browser developer tools to monitor the network request during upload
   • Check if the request is hanging on the client or server side

6. Temporary Workaround:

   • Consider implementing client-side image compression before upload
   • Add a file size limit validation to prevent large uploads

If you can provide more details about your Django version and any image processing you might be doing, I can offer more specific advice.