Django Fast Pagination

Want to improve your API performance? 💨

You can use this small package as a drop-in replacement for Django's Rest Framework DEFAULT_PAGINATION_CLASS, or apply it on a per-view basis.

Instructions

1. Install

python -m pip install git+https://github.com/ubiwhere/django-fast-pagination

2. Add to your requirements.txt

django-fast-pagination @ git+https://github.com/ubiwhere/django-fast-pagination

3. Add as the default pagination class:

REST_FRAMEWORK = {
    # Your other rest framework settings...
    "DEFAULT_PAGINATION_CLASS": "django_fast_pagination.FastPageNumberPagination",
}

or per-view basis:

from rest_framework import viewsets
from django_fast_pagination import FastPageNumberPagination

class FooViewSet(viewsets.ModelViewSet):
    pagination_class = FastPageNumberPagination

That's it! No need to add to INSTALLED_APPS, as this package does not contain any Django models

Optionally, you can define some settings:

# Configuration for Fast Pagination (all fields are optional)
FAST_PAGINATION = {
    # The url that should used when rendering an example
    # response
    "BASE_RESPONSE_URL": "https://ubiwhere.com/api/resource/?",
    # The number of items per page
    "PAGE_SIZE": 100,
    # The name of the query parameter that
    # controls the number of items to display
    # in a API response
    "PAGE_SIZE_QUERY_PARAM": "page_size",
    # The maximum number of items that can be
    # requested from the API in a single page.
    "MAX_PAGE_SIZE": 9000
}

Behind the scenes

This package works by "patching" the Django's paginator class count method, with a very large number (sys.maxsize), thus avoiding the database count query, that can have a very large performance drag on high volume databases. Currently, there aren't any known caveats to this package.

Alternative: Alternatively, you can use Django Rest built-in CursorPagination that will achieve a similar result as this package. However, it requires a more complex setup, and some model restrictions. Refer to the documentation for more information.