wget Vs urlretrieve of python

Question

I have a task to download Gbs of data from a website. The data is in form of .gz files, each file being 45mb in size.

The easy way to get the files is use "wget -r -np -A files url". This will donwload data in a recursive format and mirrors the website. The donwload rate is very high 4mb/sec.

But, just to play around I was also using python to build my urlparser.

Downloading via Python's urlretrieve is damm slow, possible 4 times as slow as wget. The download rate is 500kb/sec. I use HTMLParser for parsing the href tags.

I am not sure why is this happening. Are there any settings for this.

Thanks

Answer 1

urllib works for me as fast as wget. try this code. it shows the progress in percentage just as wget.

import sys, urllib
def reporthook(a,b,c): 
    # ',' at the end of the line is important!
    print "% 3.1f%% of %d bytes\r" % (min(100, float(a * b) / c * 100), c),
    #you can also use sys.stdout.write
    #sys.stdout.write("\r% 3.1f%% of %d bytes" 
    #                 % (min(100, float(a * b) / c * 100), c)
    sys.stdout.flush()
for url in sys.argv[1:]:
     i = url.rfind('/')
     file = url[i+1:]
     print url, "->", file
     urllib.urlretrieve(url, file, reporthook)