does httplib reuse TCP connections?

Question

I'm using httplib to grab bunch of resources from a website and i want it at minimum cost, so i set 'Connection: keep-alive' HTTP header on my requests but i'm not sure it actually uses the same TCP connection for as many requests as the webserver allows.

i = 0
    while 1:
        i += 1
        print i
        con = httplib.HTTPConnection("myweb.com")
        con.request("GET", "/x.css", headers={"Connection":" keep-alive"})
        result = con.getresponse()
        print result.reason, result.getheaders()

Is my implementation right? does keep-alive work? Should i put 'con = httplib.HTTPConnection("myweb.com")' out of the loop?

P.S: the web server's response to keep-alive is ok, i'm aware of urllib3

Answer 1

your example creates a new TCP connection each time through the loops, so no, it will not reuse that connection.

How about this?

con = httplib.HTTPConnection("myweb.com")
while True:
    con.request("GET", "/x.css", headers={"Connection":" keep-alive"})
    result = con.getresponse()
    result.read()
    print result.reason, result.getheaders()

also, if all you want is headers, you can use the HTTP HEAD method, rather than calling GET and discarding the content.