Fast HTTP Client

It is more than likely that you will have to write a client for your server software, or that, at some point, your application will have to talk to another HTTP server. The ubiquity of REST API makes their optimization patterns a prerequisite nowadays.

Note: There are a couple of ways to optimize the underlying TCP connections, but since many of them rely on operating system hacking and changing settings, they are not covered in this course.

requests

There are many HTTP clients in Python, but the most widely used and easy to work with is requests.

The first optimization to take into account is the use of a persistent connection to the Web server. Persistent connections are a standard since HTTP 1.1, though many applications do not leverage them. This lack of optimization is simple to explain if you know that when using requests in its simple mode (e.g. with the get function) the connection is closed on return. To avoid that, an application needs to use a Session object that allows reusing an already opened connection.

To run the following application, click Run and enter command python requests-session.py .