Improving Python UUID Performance in Django

In our previous series we covered a way to replace a module in the runtime. Here we are going to use it and replace the default python uuid module with a more faster implementation uuid_utils https://pypi.org/project/uuid-utils.

Let’s install the fast uuid library pip install uuid_utils and without covering the details let’s present the code which is going to replace the uuid:

import sys
import uuid
import uuid_utils

from psycopg2.extensions import register_adapter
from psycopg2.extras import UUID_adapter


def replace_uuid_module():
    replacement_module = sys.modules.get("uuid_utils")
    original_module = sys.modules.get("uuid")

    replacement_module._load_system_functions = lambda: None
    replacement_module._generate_time_safe = None

    sys.modules["uuid"] = replacement_module
    register_adapter(uuid_utils.UUID, UUID_adapter)

To make Django ORM work we need to specify the type adapter for uuid_utils.UUID class (and it can be the regular UUID_adapter since uuid from uuid_utils is backward compatible). You may skip setting _load_system_functions and _generate_time_safe to the shown values, since it can work without it.

Replacing in the Test Run

In django we run test by the following command python manage.py test thus by modifying manage.py…