Optimization of this Python code - webscraping and output results to CSV file

Question

I am trying to scrape data from a few thousands pages. The code I have works fine for about a 100 pages, but then slows down dramatically. I am pretty sure that my Tarzan-like code could be improved, so that the speed of the webscrapping process increases. Any help would be appreciated. TIA!

Here is the simplified code:

csvfile=open('test.csv', 'w', encoding='cp850', errors='replace')

writer=csv.writer(csvfile)



list_url= ["http://www.randomsite.com"]

i=1



for url in list_url:

 base_url_parts = urllib.parse.urlparse(url)

 while True:

    raw_html = urllib.request.urlopen(url).read()

    soup = BeautifulSoup(raw_html, "lxml")



    #### scrape the page for the desired info 



    i=i+1

    n=str(i)



   #Zip the data

    output_data=zip(variable_1, variable_2, variable_3, ..., variable_10)



#Write the observations to the CSV file

    writer=csv.writer(open('test.csv','a',newline='', encoding='cp850', errors='replace'))

    writer.writerows(output_data)

    csvfile.flush()



    base="http://www.randomsite.com/page"

    base2=base+n

    url_part2="/otherstuff"

    url_test = base2+url_part2



    try:

       if url_test != None:

           url = url_test

           print(url)

       else:

           break

    except: 

       break



csvfile.close()

EDIT: Thanks for all the answers, I learn quite a lot from them. I am (slowly!) learning my way around Scrapy. However, I found that the pages are available via bulk download, which will be an ever better way to solve the performance issue.

Recommended for you: Get network issues from WhatsUp Gold. Not end users.

Answer 1

The main bottleneck is that your code is synchronous (blocking). You don't proceed to the next URL until you finish processing the current one.

You need to make things asynchronously either by switching to Scrapy which solves this problem out-of-the-box, or by building something yourself via, for example, grequests.

Optimization of this Python code - webscraping and output results to CSV file

Sign up