Keeping Sessions Alive with Persistent Connections in Python Requests

When making requests to APIs or web services with the Python Requests library, it can be beneficial to use persistent sessions. A persistent session allows you to reuse the same TCP connection for multiple requests, avoiding the overhead of establishing a new connection for every request.

Why Use Persistent Sessions?

Some key advantages of using persistent sessions in Requests:

Creating a Persistent Session

import requests

session = requests.Session()

This creates a new session object you can use for all subsequent requests:

response = session.get('https://api.example.com/v1/data') 
# Session used automatically

Any custom headers, authentication, cookies or other session parameters are also retained:

session.headers.update({'X-Auth-Token': 'my-token'})

When to Use Persistent Sessions

Some good use cases:

Just be aware that sessions can consume extra TCP connections. For sporadic requests, individual requests may be preferred.