I suspect part of the speedup is avoiding the python included base64 implementation. Third party extensions[1] claim fairly large improvements. [1] https://gi

I suspect part of the speedup is avoiding the python included base64 implementation. Third party extensions[1] claim fairly large improvements. [1] https://github.com/mayeut/pybase64 https://github.com/mayeut/pybase64 This particular one also includes b64encode_as_string, which would also reduce some work/copying.