NAME

AnyEvent::Net::Curl::Queued - Moo wrapper for queued downloads via Net::Curl & AnyEvent

VERSION

version 0.047

SYNOPSIS

#!/usr/bin/env perl

package CrawlApache;
use feature qw(say);
use strict;
use utf8;
use warnings qw(all);

use HTML::LinkExtor;
use Moo;

extends 'AnyEvent::Net::Curl::Queued::Easy';

after finish => sub {
    my ($self, $result) = @_;

    say $result . "\t" . $self->final_url;

    if (
        not $self->has_error
        and $self->getinfo('content_type') =~ m{^text/html}
    ) {
        my @links;

        HTML::LinkExtor->new(sub {
            my ($tag, %links) = @_;
            push @links,
                grep { $_->scheme eq 'http' and $_->host eq 'localhost' }
                values %links;
        }, $self->final_url)->parse(${$self->data});

        for my $link (@links) {
            $self->queue->prepend(sub {
                CrawlApache->new($link);
            });
        }
    }
};

1;

package main;
use strict;
use utf8;
use warnings qw(all);

use AnyEvent::Net::Curl::Queued;

my $q = AnyEvent::Net::Curl::Queued->new;
$q->append(sub {
    CrawlApache->new('http://localhost/manual/')
});
$q->wait;

WARNING: GONE MOO!

This module isn't using Any::Moose anymore due to the announced deprecation status of that module. The switch to the Moo is known to break modules that do extend 'AnyEvent::Net::Curl::Queued::Easy' / extend 'YADA::Worker'! To keep the compatibility, make sure that you are using MooseX::NonMoose:

package YourSubclassingModule;
use Moose;
use MooseX::NonMoose;
extends 'AnyEvent::Net::Curl::Queued::Easy';
...

Or MouseX::NonMoose:

package YourSubclassingModule;
use Mouse;
use MouseX::NonMoose;
extends 'AnyEvent::Net::Curl::Queued::Easy';
...

Or the Any::Moose equivalent:

package YourSubclassingModule;
use Any::Moose;
use Any::Moose qw(X::NonMoose);
extends 'AnyEvent::Net::Curl::Queued::Easy';
...

However, the recommended approach is to switch your subclassing module to Moo altogether (you can use MooX::late to smoothen the transition):

package YourSubclassingModule;
use Moo;
use MooX::late;
extends 'AnyEvent::Net::Curl::Queued::Easy';
...

DESCRIPTION

AnyEvent::Net::Curl::Queued (a.k.a. YADA, Yet Another Download Accelerator) is an efficient and flexible batch downloader with a straight-forward interface capable of:

  • create a queue;

  • append/prepend URLs;

  • wait for downloads to end (retry on errors).

Download init/finish/error handling is defined through Moose's method modifiers.

MOTIVATION

I am very unhappy with the performance of LWP. It's almost perfect for properly handling HTTP headers, cookies & stuff, but it comes at the cost of speed. While this doesn't matter when you make single downloads, batch downloading becomes a real pain.

When I download large batch of documents, I don't care about cookies or headers, only content and proper redirection matters. And, as it is clearly an I/O bottleneck operation, I want to make as many parallel requests as possible.

So, this is what CPAN offers to fulfill my needs:

AnyEvent::Net::Curl::Queued is a glue module to wrap it all together. It offers no callbacks and (almost) no default handlers. It's up to you to extend the base class AnyEvent::Net::Curl::Queued::Easy so it will actually download something and store it somewhere.

ALTERNATIVES

As there's more than one way to do it, I'll list the alternatives which can be used to implement batch downloads:

BENCHMARK

(see also: CPAN modules for making HTTP requests)

Obviously, every download agent is (or, ideally, should be) I/O bound. However, it is not uncommon for large concurrent batch downloads to hog the processor cycles before consuming the full network bandwidth. The proposed benchmark measures the request rate of several concurrent download agents, trying hard to make all of them CPU bound (by removing the I/O constraint). On practice, this benchmark results mean that download agents with lower request rate are less appropriate for parallelized batch downloads. On the other hand, download agents with higher request rate are more likely to reach the full capacity of a network link while still leaving spare resources for data parsing/filtering.

The script eg/benchmark.pl compares AnyEvent::Net::Curl::Queued (A.K.A. YADA) against several other download agents. Only AnyEvent::Net::Curl::Queued itself, AnyEvent::Curl::Multi, Parallel::Downloader, Mojo::UserAgent and lftp support concurrent downloads natively; thus, Parallel::ForkManager is used to reproduce the same behaviour for the remaining agents, while taskset avoids the skew on multiprocessor systems.

The download target is a copy of the Apache documentation on a local Apache server. The test platform configuration:

  • Intel® Core™ i7-2600 CPU @ 3.40GHz with 8 GB RAM;

  • Ubuntu 11.10 (64-bit);

  • Perl v5.16.2 (installed via perlbrew);

  • libcurl/7.28.0 (without AsynchDNS, which slows down curl_easy_init()).

The script eg/benchmark.pl uses Benchmark::Forking and Class::Load to keep UA modules isolated and loaded only once.

$ taskset 1 perl benchmark.pl --count 100 --parallel 8 --repeat 10

                          Request rate WWW::M LWP::UA L::P::N::C Mojo::UA HTTP::L HTTP::T lftp P::D AE::C::M YADA Furl curl wget LWP::C
WWW::Mechanize v1.72             534/s     --    -32%       -61%     -63%    -80%    -82% -83% -84%     -85% -86% -94% -95% -97%   -97%
LWP::UserAgent v6.04             782/s    46%      --       -42%     -46%    -71%    -73% -75% -76%     -77% -79% -92% -93% -95%   -95%
LWP::Protocol::Net::Curl v0.011 1360/s   154%     74%         --      -6%    -50%    -53% -57% -59%     -61% -64% -86% -88% -91%   -91%
Mojo::UserAgent v3.82           1450/s   171%     85%         7%       --    -46%    -50% -54% -56%     -58% -62% -85% -87% -91%   -91%
HTTP::Lite v2.4                 2700/s   405%    245%        98%      86%      --     -7% -14% -18%     -22% -29% -71% -76% -82%   -83%
HTTP::Tiny v0.025               2910/s   445%    272%       114%     101%      8%      --  -7% -11%     -16% -23% -69% -74% -81%   -81%
lftp v4.3.1                     3140/s   488%    302%       131%     117%     17%      8%   --  -4%      -9% -17% -67% -72% -80%   -80%
Parallel::Downloader v0.121560  3280/s   514%    319%       141%     127%     22%     13%   4%   --      -5% -13% -65% -70% -79%   -79%
AnyEvent::Curl::Multi v1.1      3460/s   548%    342%       155%     139%     28%     19%  10%   5%       --  -9% -63% -69% -77%   -78%
YADA v0.038                     3790/s   610%    385%       179%     162%     41%     30%  21%  16%      10%   -- -60% -66% -75%   -76%
Furl v2.01                      9420/s  1663%   1104%       593%     550%    249%    223% 200% 187%     172% 148%   -- -15% -39%   -40%
curl v7.28.0                   11100/s  1977%   1318%       716%     666%    311%    281% 253% 238%     221% 193%  18%   -- -28%   -29%
wget v1.12                     15400/s  2777%   1864%      1031%     961%    470%    428% 389% 368%     344% 305%  63%  39%   --    -1%
LWP::Curl v0.12                15600/s  2818%   1892%      1047%     976%    478%    435% 396% 375%     350% 311%  65%  40%   1%     --

(output formatted to show module versions at row labels and keep column labels abbreviated)

ATTRIBUTES

allow_dups

Allow duplicate requests (default: false). By default, requests to the same URL (more precisely, requests with the same signature are issued only once. To seed POST parameters, you must extend the AnyEvent::Net::Curl::Queued::Easy class. Setting allow_dups to true value disables request checks.

common_opts

"opts" in AnyEvent::Net::Curl::Queued::Easy attribute common to all workers initialized under the same queue. You may define User-Agent string here.

http_response

Encapsulate the response with HTTP::Response (only when the scheme is HTTP/HTTPS); a global version of "http_response" in AnyEvent::Net::Curl::Queued::Easy. Default: disabled.

completed

Count completed requests.

cv

AnyEvent condition variable. Initialized automatically, unless you specify your own. Also reset automatically after "wait", so keep your own reference if you really need it!

max

Maximum number of parallel connections (default: 4; minimum value: 1).

multi

Net::Curl::Multi instance.

queue

ArrayRef to the queue. Has the following helper methods:

queue_push

Append item at the end of the queue.

queue_unshift

Prepend item at the top of the queue.

dequeue

Shift item from the top of the queue.

count

Number of items in queue.

share

Net::Curl::Share instance.

stats

AnyEvent::Net::Curl::Queued::Stats instance.

timeout

Timeout (default: 60 seconds).

unique

Signature cache.

watchdog

The last resort against the non-deterministic chaos of evil lurking sockets.

METHODS

inc_completed

Increment the "completed" counter.

start()

Populate empty request slots with workers from the queue.

empty()

Check if there are active requests or requests in queue.

add($worker)

Activate a worker.

append($worker)

Put the worker (instance of AnyEvent::Net::Curl::Queued::Easy) at the end of the queue. For lazy initialization, wrap the worker in a sub { ... }, the same way you do with the Moo default => sub { ... }:

$queue->append(sub {
    AnyEvent::Net::Curl::Queued::Easy->new({ initial_url => 'http://.../' })
});

prepend($worker)

Put the worker (instance of AnyEvent::Net::Curl::Queued::Easy) at the beginning of the queue. For lazy initialization, wrap the worker in a sub { ... }, the same way you do with the Moo default => sub { ... }:

$queue->prepend(sub {
    AnyEvent::Net::Curl::Queued::Easy->new({ initial_url => 'http://.../' })
});

wait()

Process queue.

CAVEAT

  • Many sources suggest to compile libcurl with c-ares support. This only improves performance if you are supposed to do many DNS resolutions (e.g. access many hosts). If you are fetching many documents from a single server, c-ares initialization will actually slow down the whole process!

SEE ALSO

AUTHOR

Stanislaw Pusep <stas@sysd.org>

COPYRIGHT AND LICENSE

This software is copyright (c) 2014 by Stanislaw Pusep.

This is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as the Perl 5 programming language system itself.