How can I add a connection timeout with asyncio?

Question

I want to connect to a list of a lot of different sites very fast. Im using asyncio to do this in an asynchronous manner and now want to add a timeout for when connections should be ignored if they take too long to respond.

How do I implement this?

import ssl
import asyncio
from contextlib import suppress
from concurrent.futures import ThreadPoolExecutor
import time


@asyncio.coroutine
def run():
    while True:
        host = yield from q.get()
        if not host:
            break

        with suppress(ssl.CertificateError):
            reader, writer = yield from asyncio.open_connection(host[1], 443, ssl=True) #timout option?
            reader.close()
            writer.close()


@asyncio.coroutine
def load_q():
    # only 3 entries for debugging reasons
    for host in [[1, 'python.org'], [2, 'qq.com'], [3, 'google.com']]:
        yield from q.put(host)
    for _ in range(NUM):
        q.put(None)


if __name__ == "__main__":
    NUM = 1000
    q = asyncio.Queue()

    loop = asyncio.get_event_loop()
    loop.set_default_executor(ThreadPoolExecutor(NUM))

    start = time.time()
    coros = [asyncio.async(run()) for i in range(NUM)]
    loop.run_until_complete(load_q())
    loop.run_until_complete(asyncio.wait(coros))
    end = time.time()
    print(end-start)

(On a sidenote: Has somebody an idea how to optimize this?)

Answer 1

You can wrap the call to open_connection in asyncio.wait_for, which allows you to specify a timeout:

    with suppress(ssl.CertificateError):
        fut = asyncio.open_connection(host[1], 443, ssl=True)
        try:
            # Wait for 3 seconds, then raise TimeoutError
            reader, writer = yield from asyncio.wait_for(fut, timeout=3)
        except asyncio.TimeoutError:
            print("Timeout, skipping {}".format(host[1]))
            continue

Note that when TimeoutError is raised, the open_connection coroutine is also cancelled. If you don't want it to be cancelled (though I think you do want it to be cancelled in this case), you have wrap the call in asyncio.shield.