What is the fastest way to send 100,000 HTTP requests in Python?

Twistedless solution:

from urlparse import urlparse
from threading import Thread
import httplib, sys
from Queue import Queue

concurrent = 200

def doWork():
    while True:
        url = q.get()
        status, url = getStatus(url)
        doSomethingWithResult(status, url)
        q.task_done()

def getStatus(ourl):
    try:
        url = urlparse(ourl)
        conn = httplib.HTTPConnection(url.netloc)   
        conn.request("HEAD", url.path)
        res = conn.getresponse()
        return res.status, ourl
    except:
        return "error", ourl

def doSomethingWithResult(status, url):
    print status, url

q = Queue(concurrent * 2)
for i in range(concurrent):
    t = Thread(target=doWork)
    t.daemon = True
    t.start()
try:
    for url in open('urllist.txt'):
        q.put(url.strip())
    q.join()
except KeyboardInterrupt:
    sys.exit(1)

This one is slighty faster than the twisted solution and uses less CPU.


Things have changed quite a bit since 2010 when this was posted and I haven't tried all the other answers but I have tried a few, and I found this to work the best for me using python3.6.

I was able to fetch about ~150 unique domains per second running on AWS.

import pandas as pd
import concurrent.futures
import requests
import time

out = []
CONNECTIONS = 100
TIMEOUT = 5

tlds = open('../data/sample_1k.txt').read().splitlines()
urls = ['http://{}'.format(x) for x in tlds[1:]]

def load_url(url, timeout):
    ans = requests.head(url, timeout=timeout)
    return ans.status_code

with concurrent.futures.ThreadPoolExecutor(max_workers=CONNECTIONS) as executor:
    future_to_url = (executor.submit(load_url, url, TIMEOUT) for url in urls)
    time1 = time.time()
    for future in concurrent.futures.as_completed(future_to_url):
        try:
            data = future.result()
        except Exception as exc:
            data = str(type(exc))
        finally:
            out.append(data)

            print(str(len(out)),end="\r")

    time2 = time.time()

print(f'Took {time2-time1:.2f} s')
print(pd.Series(out).value_counts())

A solution using tornado asynchronous networking library

from tornado import ioloop, httpclient

i = 0

def handle_request(response):
    print(response.code)
    global i
    i -= 1
    if i == 0:
        ioloop.IOLoop.instance().stop()

http_client = httpclient.AsyncHTTPClient()
for url in open('urls.txt'):
    i += 1
    http_client.fetch(url.strip(), handle_request, method='HEAD')
ioloop.IOLoop.instance().start()