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Python Async Programming: Building High-Performance Web Scrapers

Async programming is Python's most powerful yet misunderstood feature. Here is how to build a production-ready async crawler.

The Performance Gap

Fetching 100 URLs (1 second each):

  • Synchronous: ~100 seconds
  • Asynchronous: ~2-3 seconds

That is 30-50x faster with the same hardware.

Key Patterns

Features of Production Crawler

  • Concurrency control with semaphores
  • Automatic retries with exponential backoff
  • SQLite persistence
  • Progress monitoring

Full code includes 200+ lines with AsyncCrawler class, metrics collection, and graceful shutdown.


Complete code on my blog

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