Python Requests Async Session
If you are working on a project that requires sending multiple HTTP requests, you may want to consider using an asynchronous session in Python requests. This can greatly improve the speed and efficiency of your code.
What is an asynchronous session?
An asynchronous session allows you to send multiple HTTP requests concurrently, without waiting for each request to complete before sending the next one. This can be especially useful when working with APIs that have rate limits, as it allows you to send requests more quickly without exceeding the limit.
How to use an asynchronous session in Python requests
To use an asynchronous session in Python requests, you will need to use the asyncio
library. Here is an example:
import asyncio
import aiohttp
async def fetch(session, url):
async with session.get(url) as response:
return await response.text()
async def main():
async with aiohttp.ClientSession() as session:
tasks = []
for i in range(5):
task = asyncio.ensure_future(fetch(session, f'https://example.com/page{i}'))
tasks.append(task)
results = await asyncio.gather(*tasks)
print(results)
loop = asyncio.get_event_loop()
loop.run_until_complete(main())
In this example, we are using the aiohttp
library to create an asynchronous session. We define a function called fetch
that will send a GET request to a given URL and return the response text. We then define a main
function that creates a list of tasks, one for each URL we want to fetch. We use the asyncio.gather
function to run all the tasks concurrently, and wait for them to complete before printing the results.
It is important to note that when using an asynchronous session, you should avoid using blocking I/O operations like time.sleep
. Instead, you should use asynchronous equivalents like asyncio.sleep
or asyncio.wait
.
Alternative approaches
There are other libraries and approaches you can use to achieve asynchronous requests in Python, such as asynciohttp
, aioxmlrpc
, and aiojsonrpc
. You can also use threads
or processes
to send requests concurrently, although this can be more complicated to implement.
In conclusion, using an asynchronous session in Python requests can greatly improve the performance and efficiency of your code when sending multiple HTTP requests. It is definitely worth considering if you are working on a project that involves a lot of API calls or scraping data from websites.