Sorl-Thumbnail REEALLY slow

Question

I have lots of big images in my django website that I am using sorl-thumbnail to compress down on page loads. Because there are so many big images, it sometimes takes a REALLY long time for my page to load the first time--- even causing an nginx timeout at times. Is there anything I can do to prevent this from happening to the user on their first experience with this website?

I looked here: Django sorl thumbnail Crash - Lots of Large images, but all they said was to deal with it basically the first time.

Answer 1

What you linked is correct. There is not a way to speed up the process without increasing the power you give it. You can however have those images called with ajax and have placeholders to keep it formatted correctly. That will allow the page to load and then once the images are ready ajax can load them for you. This is overly complex but that is the only solution that I can think of. Otherwise it will load fast after they are processed the first time and to me that is the way to do it.