"The urlopen() and urlretrieve() functions can cause arbitrarily long delays"

[Ian Kelly]

On Sun, Feb 24, 2013 at 10:48 AM, 7segment <7segment at live.com> wrote:
> Hi!
>
> The subject is a segment of a sentence which I copied from Python's
> official homepage. In whole, it reads:
>
> "The urlopen() and urlretrieve() functions can cause arbitrarily long
> delays while waiting for a network connection to be set up. This means
> that it is difficult to build an interactive Web client using these
> functions without using threads."

I believe what this is warning about is that if a network connection
is not immediately available when the functions are called, they will
block while waiting for one rather than returning control to the
calling function.  If used in an interactive client without threads,
this would cause the application to appear to "hang" while urllib
waits for a response.  I don't think it's meant to suggest that urllib
is responsible for the delays; that sounds like a problem with your
network configuration.