How to set TCP_NODELAY flag when loading URL with urllib2?

Question

I am using urllib2 for loading web-page, my code is:

httpRequest = urllib2.Request("http:/www....com")
pageContent = urllib2.urlopen(httpRequest)
pageContent.readline()

How can I get hold of the socket properties to set TCP_NODELAY?

In normal socket I would be using function:

socket.setsockopt(socket.IPPROTO_TCP, socket.TCP_NODELAY, 1)

Answer 1

If you need to access to such low level property on the socket used, you'll have to overload some objects.

First, you'll need to create a subclass of HTTPHandler, that in the standard library do :

class HTTPHandler(AbstractHTTPHandler):

    def http_open(self, req):
        return self.do_open(httplib.HTTPConnection, req)

    http_request = AbstractHTTPHandler.do_request_

As you can see, it uses a HTTPConnection to open connection... You'll have to override it too ;) to upgrade the connect() method.

Something like this should be a good start :

class LowLevelHTTPConnection(httplib.HTTPConnection):

    def connect(self):
        httplib.HTTPConnection.connect(self)
        self.sock.setsockopt(socket.IPPROTO_TCP, socket.TCP_NODELAY, 1)


class LowLevelHTTPHandler(HTTPHandler):

    def http_open(self, req):
        return self.do_open(LowLevelHTTPConnection, req)

urllib2 is smart enough to allow you to subclass some handler and then use it, the urllib2.build_opener is made for this :

urllib2.install_opener(urllib2.build_opener(LowLevelHTTPHandler)) # tell urllib2 to use your HTTPHandler in replacement of the standard HTTPHandler
httpRequest = urllib2.Request("http:/www....com")
pageContent = urllib2.urlopen(httpRequest)
pageContent.readline()