Accelerate S3 upload with paperclip

Question

I'm using paperclip for uploading images in S3. But I've noted that this upload is very slow. I think because before complete the submit the file has to pass by my server, be processed and be sent to the S3 server.

Is there a method for accelerate this?

thanks

Answer 1

Do you want to improve the appearance of the upload being faster or actually make the upload faster?

If it's the former you can put your image handling logic into a background task using something like delayed_job. This way when a user clicks the button they'll immediately go to their next page while you process the image (you can show a "processing in progress" image placeholder until the task is finished).

If it's the latter then it's entirely down to your server and internet connection. Where are you hosting?

Answer 2

How about uploading direct to S3?

Not sure if paperclip does this out of the box, but you could make it.

http://docs.amazonwebservices.com/AmazonS3/2006-03-01/dev/index.html?UsingHTTPPOST.html

Answer 3

As cwninja recommends, we upload direct to s3 so as to get rid of this extra upload. We use a modified version of the plugin described in this blog post:

http://www.elctech.com/articles/updates-on-rails-s3-flash-upload-plugin

Ours is modified to handle multiple file uploads (rewrote the the flex object

Not sure how well this plays with paperclip, we use attachment_fu, but it wasn't so bad to get it to work with that.

Answer 4

Use delayed jobs, this is a good example here
Or you can use flash upload.