Python 2.7: How to properly handle the GIL in a multithreaded web scraper?
After trying multiple solutions online, I still can't figure this out. I've been researching this but After trying multiple solutions online, I still can't figure this out... I'm working on a web scraper using Python 2.7, and I'm encountering performance issues due to the Global Interpreter Lock (GIL). My scraper is designed to fetch data from multiple URLs concurrently, but I noticed that using multithreading isn't providing the speed boost I expected. I have implemented a thread pool to manage my threads, but the I/O operations seem to be blocking each other, causing delays. Here's a simplified version of what I have: ```python import threading import requests from Queue import Queue class ScraperThread(threading.Thread): def __init__(self, url_queue): threading.Thread.__init__(self) self.url_queue = url_queue def run(self): while True: url = self.url_queue.get() if url is None: break response = requests.get(url) print('Fetched {} bytes from {}'.format(len(response.content), url)) self.url_queue.task_done() url_list = ['http://example.com/page1', 'http://example.com/page2', ...] url_queue = Queue() # Fill the queue for url in url_list: url_queue.put(url) # Create and start threads threads = [] for i in range(5): # 5 threads thread = ScraperThread(url_queue) thread.start() threads.append(thread) # Wait for the queue to finish processing url_queue.join() # Stop the threads for i in range(5): url_queue.put(None) for thread in threads: thread.join() ``` I noticed that my program's performance doesn't significantly improve when using more threads, and I'm still running into throttling issues from the server. Is there a better way to handle concurrent requests in Python 2.7 without running into GIL limitations? Should I be using multiprocessing instead, or is there a specific design pattern that would help alleviate the GIL impact? Any suggestions on optimizing this design for better performance would be greatly appreciated. My development environment is macOS. My development environment is Ubuntu 22.04. Any suggestions would be helpful.