Boosting Your Discord Bot's Performance with aiohttp

If you've built a Python-based Discord bot, you may have run into performance issues when making multiple API calls or downloading data. The synchronous requests library can bottleneck your bot's event loop.

Enter aiohttp - the leading asynchronous HTTP client for Python. By running HTTP requests in async coroutines, aiohttp prevents blocking and massively improves concurrency.

Making Requests Non-Blocking with aiohttp Sessions

The key is to create an aiohttp ClientSession and use its get() and post() methods to make requests:

import aiohttp

async def get_data():
  async with aiohttp.ClientSession() as session:
    async with session.get('http://api.example.com') as response:
      data = await response.json()
  return data

This allows other bot tasks to run while waiting for the API response.

Gracefully Handling Timeouts

Set a timeout to prevent hanging if an API call fails:

session = aiohttp.ClientSession(timeout=10)

You can also wrap requests in try/except blocks to catch timeouts.

Going Further

Other tips for optimizing aiohttp performance:

With aiohttp, you can build Discord bots that scale to handle high workloads without compromising responsiveness. Give your bot a speed boost today!