Limiting/throttling the rate of HTTP requests in GRequests

Question

I'm writing a small script in Python 2.7.3 with GRequests and lxml that will allow me to gather some collectible card prices from various websites and compare them. Problem is one of the websites limits the number of requests and sends back HTTP error 429 if I exceed it.

Is there a way to add throttling the number of requests in GRequestes so that I don't exceed the number of requests per second I specify? Also - how can I make GRequestes retry after some time if HTTP 429 occurs?

On a side note - their limit is ridiculously low. Something like 8 requests per 15 seconds. I breached it with my browser on multiple occasions just refreshing the page waiting for price changes.

Answer 1

Going to answer my own question since I had to figure this by myself and there seems to be very little info on this going around.

The idea is as follows. Every request object used with GRequests can take a session object as a parameter when created. Session objects on the other hand can have HTTP adapters mounted that are used when making requests. By creating our own adapter we can intercept requests and rate-limit them in way we find best for our application. In my case I ended up with the code below.

Object used for throttling:

DEFAULT_BURST_WINDOW = datetime.timedelta(seconds=5)
DEFAULT_WAIT_WINDOW = datetime.timedelta(seconds=15)


class BurstThrottle(object):
    max_hits = None
    hits = None
    burst_window = None
    total_window = None
    timestamp = None

    def __init__(self, max_hits, burst_window, wait_window):
        self.max_hits = max_hits
        self.hits = 0
        self.burst_window = burst_window
        self.total_window = burst_window + wait_window
        self.timestamp = datetime.datetime.min

    def throttle(self):
        now = datetime.datetime.utcnow()
        if now < self.timestamp + self.total_window:
            if (now < self.timestamp + self.burst_window) and (self.hits < self.max_hits):
                self.hits += 1
                return datetime.timedelta(0)
            else:
                return self.timestamp + self.total_window - now
        else:
            self.timestamp = now
            self.hits = 1
            return datetime.timedelta(0)

HTTP adapter:

class MyHttpAdapter(requests.adapters.HTTPAdapter):
    throttle = None

    def __init__(self, pool_connections=requests.adapters.DEFAULT_POOLSIZE,
                 pool_maxsize=requests.adapters.DEFAULT_POOLSIZE, max_retries=requests.adapters.DEFAULT_RETRIES,
                 pool_block=requests.adapters.DEFAULT_POOLBLOCK, burst_window=DEFAULT_BURST_WINDOW,
                 wait_window=DEFAULT_WAIT_WINDOW):
        self.throttle = BurstThrottle(pool_maxsize, burst_window, wait_window)
        super(MyHttpAdapter, self).__init__(pool_connections=pool_connections, pool_maxsize=pool_maxsize,
                                            max_retries=max_retries, pool_block=pool_block)

    def send(self, request, stream=False, timeout=None, verify=True, cert=None, proxies=None):
        request_successful = False
        response = None
        while not request_successful:
            wait_time = self.throttle.throttle()
            while wait_time > datetime.timedelta(0):
                gevent.sleep(wait_time.total_seconds(), ref=True)
                wait_time = self.throttle.throttle()

            response = super(MyHttpAdapter, self).send(request, stream=stream, timeout=timeout,
                                                       verify=verify, cert=cert, proxies=proxies)

            if response.status_code != 429:
                request_successful = True

        return response

Setup:

requests_adapter = adapter.MyHttpAdapter(
    pool_connections=__CONCURRENT_LIMIT__,
    pool_maxsize=__CONCURRENT_LIMIT__,
    max_retries=0,
    pool_block=False,
    burst_window=datetime.timedelta(seconds=5),
    wait_window=datetime.timedelta(seconds=20))

requests_session = requests.session()
requests_session.mount('http://', requests_adapter)
requests_session.mount('https://', requests_adapter)

unsent_requests = (grequests.get(url,
                                 hooks={'response': handle_response},
                                 session=requests_session) for url in urls)
grequests.map(unsent_requests, size=__CONCURRENT_LIMIT__)