Speed up web scraper

Looking at your code, I'd say most of that time is spent in network requests rather than processing the responses. All of the tips @alecxe provides in his answer apply, but I'd suggest the HTTPCACHE_ENABLED setting, since it caches the requests and avoids doing it a second time. It would help on following crawls and even offline development. See more info in the docs: http://doc.scrapy.org/en/latest/topics/downloader-middleware.html#module-scrapy.contrib.downloadermiddleware.httpcache

Here's a collection of things to try:

• use latest scrapy version (if not using already)
• check if non-standard middlewares are used
• try to increase CONCURRENT_REQUESTS_PER_DOMAIN, CONCURRENT_REQUESTS settings (docs)
• turn off logging LOG_ENABLED = False (docs)
• try yielding an item in a loop instead of collecting items into the items list and returning them
• use local cache DNS (see this thread)
• check if this site is using download threshold and limits your download speed (see this thread)
• log cpu and memory usage during the spider run - see if there are any problems there
• try run the same spider under scrapyd service
• see if grequests + lxml will perform better (ask if you need any help with implementing this solution)
• try running Scrapy on pypy, see Running Scrapy on PyPy

Hope that helps.