We anticipate that after a production deployment of our registry instance, it won't be long before we have to handle very large container image uploads. We'd like to find a way to handle this before we actually open it up to a large audience.

As of right now, with a fairly stock configuration, nginx will buffer the POST body in memory, which will obviously fail on relatively small image uploads. This can be improved by tweaks to the client_body_temp_path and client_max_body_size settings, but no matter what, the upload is being buffered before being proxied to uwsgi, and a bottleneck exists.

Ideally, a large image would be uploaded directly to its final location on the filesystem. After some research, I believe the best method would be to use the nginx upload module: https://www.nginx.com/resources/wiki/modules/upload/

The documentation on how to use this with Django is sparse, but here are some links I've found that might be helpful (only the first one mentions a django solution, but the principle is the same):

https://blog.vrplumber.com/b/2013/06/07/nginx-upload-module/
https://thomas.rabaix.net/blog/2014/05/handling-file-upload-is-not-always-easy
https://jiripudil.cz/blog/blazing-fast-file-upload-through-nginx

I'm aware there's also a problem with HTTPS and size limits using Requests (issue #108 ), but we can live with allowing plain HTTP as long as there's a way to handle the use case of very large images.