When writing Python code to interact with web APIs or scrape websites, the choice of HTTP library can have a significant impact on performance. Two of the most popular options are requests and Python's built-in urllib. But which one is faster?
Requests - Fast and Simple
The requests library provides a simple, elegant interface for making HTTP requests in Python. It abstracts away a lot of the low-level details, making it very easy to use.
In terms of performance, requests is quite fast - generally faster than urllib for most use cases. Here's why:
Connection pooling and keep-alive - requests reuses connections intelligently with connection pooling, avoiding expensive TLS handshakes.HTTP persistent connections - requests utilizes HTTP keep-alive to reuse the same TCP connection for multiple requests, reducing latency.Efficient encoding/decoding - requests uses optimized C libraries like chardet for encoding and decoding payloads, instead of slow Python implementations.So for most API, web scraping, or HTTP automation tasks, requests will provide better performance versus urllib.
Urllib - Lower Level Control
The urllib set of modules (like urllib2, urllib3) provide building blocks for working with HTTP at a lower level in Python. Some advantages:
More control over details like headers, redirection, retriesAbility to use advanced HTTP features like proxies and authenticationHowever, this comes at a performance cost in most cases. Using urllib directly means you manage connections, handle HTTP persistent connections manually, and encode/decode payloads in Python instead of efficient C libraries.
Conclusion
For most tasks, the simplicity and performance of the requests library makes it a better choice over using urllib directly. But for advanced use cases that require lower-level control, urllib has the hooks to achieve that flexibility.
