I was wrong about Python being too slow for real projects

Built a simple web scraper in Python that pulled 10,000 pages in under 3 minutes - never thought it would handle that kind of load. Made me realize most beginner worries about speed don't matter until you're dealing with millions of records, has anyone else found their assumptions about a language were off once they actually pushed it?

3 comments

3 Comments

young.kim29d ago

Huh, I actually see it a bit different here. @the_jessica, your 50k listings sound solid but I've definitely hit Python walls when dealing with real-time data processing and heavy concurrent connections. Network and database bottlenecks are real, but Python's GIL still trips up CPU-bound stuff faster than people admit in production.

the_jessica29d ago

10,000 pages in under 3 minutes is pretty impressive for Python. I had the exact same wake-up call a few years ago when I was building a tool to scrape real estate listings for a friend's side project. I assumed I'd need to switch to something like Go or Rust halfway through because of speed worries. But Python chugged through over 50,000 listings without breaking a sweat, just using requests and some basic threading. It really opened my eyes to how much overhead we worry about that just doesn't matter for most real world jobs. Most of the time, the bottleneck is the network or the database, not the language itself. I'm glad you gave it a real try instead of just taking the online rumors at face value.

joel_hall1728d ago

Damn, people really get defensive about their languages huh? Look, 10k pages in 3 minutes is fine for a hobby script. But let's be real - that's 55 pages per second. My old laptop could sneeze and match that. The bottleneck argument gets old. When you scale up, the language DOES matter. Python's GIL hits hard on CPU stuff. And real-time data? Forget it. I've seen too many people solve small problems with Python then act surprised when it chokes on heavy loads. It's great for glue code and prototyping. But calling it production-ready for serious scraping is a stretch. You're one regex away from hitting a wall.