Asynchronous Requests with Python requests

Note

The below answer is not applicable to requests v0.13.0+. The asynchronous functionality was moved to grequests after this question was written. However, you could just replace requests with grequests below and it should work.

I've left this answer as is to reflect the original question which was about using requests < v0.13.0.

---

To do multiple tasks with async.map asynchronously you have to:

1. Define a function for what you want to do with each object (your task)
2. Add that function as an event hook in your request
3. Call async.map on a list of all the requests / actions

Example:

from requests import async
# If using requests > v0.13.0, use
# from grequests import async

urls = [
    'http://python-requests.org',
    'http://httpbin.org',
    'http://python-guide.org',
    'http://kennethreitz.com'
]

# A simple task to do to each response object
def do_something(response):
    print response.url

# A list to hold our things to do via async
async_list = []

for u in urls:
    # The "hooks = {..." part is where you define what you want to do
    # 
    # Note the lack of parentheses following do_something, this is
    # because the response will be used as the first argument automatically
    action_item = async.get(u, hooks = {'response' : do_something})

    # Add the task to our list of things to do via async
    async_list.append(action_item)

# Do our list of things to do via async
async.map(async_list)

I tested both requests-futures and grequests. Grequests is faster but brings monkey patching and additional problems with dependencies. requests-futures is several times slower than grequests. I decided to write my own and simply wrapped requests into ThreadPoolExecutor and it was almost as fast as grequests, but without external dependencies.

import requests
import concurrent.futures

def get_urls():
    return ["url1","url2"]

def load_url(url, timeout):
    return requests.get(url, timeout = timeout)

with concurrent.futures.ThreadPoolExecutor(max_workers=20) as executor:

    future_to_url = {executor.submit(load_url, url, 10): url for url in     get_urls()}
    for future in concurrent.futures.as_completed(future_to_url):
        url = future_to_url[future]
        try:
            data = future.result()
        except Exception as exc:
            resp_err = resp_err + 1
        else:
            resp_ok = resp_ok + 1

async is now an independent module : grequests.

See here : https://github.com/kennethreitz/grequests

And there: Ideal method for sending multiple HTTP requests over Python?

installation:

$ pip install grequests

usage:

build a stack:

import grequests

urls = [
    'http://www.heroku.com',
    'http://tablib.org',
    'http://httpbin.org',
    'http://python-requests.org',
    'http://kennethreitz.com'
]

rs = (grequests.get(u) for u in urls)

send the stack

grequests.map(rs)

result looks like

[<Response [200]>, <Response [200]>, <Response [200]>, <Response [200]>, <Response [200]>]

grequests don't seem to set a limitation for concurrent requests, ie when multiple requests are sent to the same server.

Unfortunately, as far as I know, the requests library is not equipped for performing asynchronous requests. You can wrap async/await syntax around requests, but that will make the underlying requests no less synchronous. If you want true async requests, you must use other tooling that provides it. One such solution is aiohttp (Python 3.5.3+). It works well in my experience using it with the Python 3.7 async/await syntax. Below I write three implementations of performing n web requests using

1. Purely synchronous requests (sync_requests_get_all) using the Python requests library
2. Synchronous requests (async_requests_get_all) using the Python requests library wrapped in Python 3.7 async/await syntax and asyncio
3. A truly asynchronous implementation (async_aiohttp_get_all) with the Python aiohttp library wrapped in Python 3.7 async/await syntax and asyncio

"""
Tested in Python 3.5.10
"""

import time
import asyncio
import requests
import aiohttp

from asgiref import sync

def timed(func):
    """
    records approximate durations of function calls
    """
    def wrapper(*args, **kwargs):
        start = time.time()
        print('{name:<30} started'.format(name=func.__name__))
        result = func(*args, **kwargs)
        duration = "{name:<30} finished in {elapsed:.2f} seconds".format(
            name=func.__name__, elapsed=time.time() - start
        )
        print(duration)
        timed.durations.append(duration)
        return result
    return wrapper

timed.durations = []


@timed
def sync_requests_get_all(urls):
    """
    performs synchronous get requests
    """
    # use session to reduce network overhead
    session = requests.Session()
    return [session.get(url).json() for url in urls]


@timed
def async_requests_get_all(urls):
    """
    asynchronous wrapper around synchronous requests
    """
    session = requests.Session()
    # wrap requests.get into an async function
    def get(url):
        return session.get(url).json()
    async_get = sync.sync_to_async(get)

    async def get_all(urls):
        return await asyncio.gather(*[
            async_get(url) for url in urls
        ])
    # call get_all as a sync function to be used in a sync context
    return sync.async_to_sync(get_all)(urls)

@timed
def async_aiohttp_get_all(urls):
    """
    performs asynchronous get requests
    """
    async def get_all(urls):
        async with aiohttp.ClientSession() as session:
            async def fetch(url):
                async with session.get(url) as response:
                    return await response.json()
            return await asyncio.gather(*[
                fetch(url) for url in urls
            ])
    # call get_all as a sync function to be used in a sync context
    return sync.async_to_sync(get_all)(urls)


if __name__ == '__main__':
    # this endpoint takes ~3 seconds to respond,
    # so a purely synchronous implementation should take
    # little more than 30 seconds and a purely asynchronous
    # implementation should take little more than 3 seconds.
    urls = ['https://postman-echo.com/delay/3']*10

    async_aiohttp_get_all(urls)
    async_requests_get_all(urls)
    sync_requests_get_all(urls)
    print('----------------------')
    [print(duration) for duration in timed.durations]

On my machine, this is the output:

async_aiohttp_get_all          started
async_aiohttp_get_all          finished in 3.20 seconds
async_requests_get_all         started
async_requests_get_all         finished in 30.61 seconds
sync_requests_get_all          started
sync_requests_get_all          finished in 30.59 seconds
----------------------
async_aiohttp_get_all          finished in 3.20 seconds
async_requests_get_all         finished in 30.61 seconds
sync_requests_get_all          finished in 30.59 seconds