urllib2 FTP Weirdness
Steven D'Aprano
steve+comp.lang.python at pearwood.info
Wed Feb 6 21:43:24 EST 2013
On Thu, 07 Feb 2013 10:06:32 +1100, Cameron Simpson wrote:
> | I cannot see how the firewall could possible distinguish between using
> | a temporary variable or not in these two snippets:
> |
> | # no temporary variable hangs, or fails
> | urllib2.urlopen("ftp://ftp2.census.gov/").read()
> |
> | # temporary variable succeeds
> | response = urllib2.urlopen("ftp://ftp2.census.gov/")
> | response.read()
>
> Timing. (Let me say I consider this scenario unlikely, very unlikely.
> But...)
>
> If the latter is consistently slightly slower
On my laptop, the difference is of the order of 10 microseconds. About
half a million times smaller than the amount of time it takes to open the
connection in the first place.
> then the firewall may be
> an issue if active FTP is being used. "Active" FTP requires the FTP
> server to connect to you to deliver the data: your end opens a listening
> TCP socket and says "get", supplying the socket details.
If you are thinking that the socket gets closed if the read is delayed
too much, that doesn't explain the results you are getting. The read
succeeds when there is a delay, not when there is no delay. Almost as if
something is saying "oh, the read request came in too soon after the
connection was made, must block".
What can I say? I cannot reproduce the issue you are having. If you can
reproduce it, try again without the firewall. If bypassing the firewall
makes the issue go away, then go and yell at your network admins until
they fix it.
--
Steven
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