How to avoid program freezing when connecting to server

Question

I have a little script which filters those domain names which are not registred yet. I use pywhois module. The problem is that it suddenly freeze and do nothing after several (sometimes hundreds) of requests. I think it is not a ban because I can run the program right after freeze and it works.

I would like to avoid this freezing. My idea is to count runtime of the function and if the time cross some line (for example 10 seconds) it repeats the code.

Do you have any advice how to avoid the freezing? Or the better way to check domains?

Here is the code:

for keyword in keywords:
        try:
            details = pythonwhois.get_whois(keyword+'.com')
        except Exception as e:
            print e
            continue
        if 'status' not in details.keys():
            print 'Free domain!'
            print keyword

Answer 1

This method is prone to change (if the underlying library changes), however, you can call internal socket functions to set a timeout for all pythonwhois network calls. For example:

TIMEOUT = 5.0 # timeout in seconds
pythonwhois.net.socket.setdefaulttimeout(TIMEOUT)
pythonwhois.get_whois("example.com")