urllib slow on Leopard

Sun Feb 24 16:14:47 EST 2008

mark wrote:
> I've recently switched from Ubuntu to OS X Leopard. I have some python
> scripts which download info from the web. The scripts were working fine
> before on Ubuntu, but urllib seems to work really slowly on Leopard.
> 
> I tried an example from the docs:
> 
>>>> import urllib2
>>>> f = urllib2.urlopen('http://www.python.org/')
>>>> print f.read(100)
> <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN"
> "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtm
>>>>
> 
> The line f = ... takes about a minute to return - but otherwise returns
> the predicted result. My web connection seems fine, so has anyone got
> any ideas as to what the problem might be?

It likely tries to load the DTD in the background, which requires network access.

http://www.w3.org/blog/systeam/2008/02/08/w3c_s_excessive_dtd_traffic

Stefan