Web scraping: When switching from Python's requests to httpx doesn't improve speed
A technical analysis compares Python HTTP clients requests and httpx for web scraping tasks. The article explains that httpx offers modern features like async support and HTTP/2 capability while maintaining compatibility with requests' API. It argues that for single-target scraping with built-in politeness delays, client speed is rarely the bottleneck, making async benefits negligible. However, httpx provides significant time savings when scraping hundreds of independent targets simultaneously. The piece concludes that developers should analyze their specific scraping bottlenecks before migrating, as code complexity costs may outweigh performance gains.
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