Python urllib2.urlopen() is slow, need a better way to read several urls

Question

As the title suggests, I\'m working on a site written in python and it makes several calls to the urllib2 module to read websites. I then parse them with BeautifulSoup.

Answer 1

1) Are you opening the same site many times, or many different site? If many different sites, I think urllib2 is good. If doing the same site over and over again, I have had some personal luck with urllib3 http://code.google.com/p/urllib3/

2) BeautifulSoup is easy to use, but is pretty slow. If you do have to use it, make sure to decompose your tags to get rid of memory leaks.. or it will likely lead to memory issues (did for me).

What do your memory and cpu look like? If you are maxing your CPU, make sure you are using real heavyweight threads, so you can run on more than 1 core.