When I insert large blobs, e.g. a 10 MB byte string into a longblob field, it takes several seconds to prepare the value for insertion. Profiling indicates that most of that time is spent in the escape_bytes function in converters.py. Here is that function for reference.

def escape_bytes(value, mapping=None):
    # escape_bytes is calld only on Python 3.
    return escape_str(value.decode('ascii', 'surrogateescape'), mapping)

When I performed the same insertion through another interface, the escaping was about 100 times faster.

Is there a way to speed this up?