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

[MRAB]

On 2013-02-24 18:55, Ian Kelly wrote:
> 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.
>
When in doubt, check some other way, such as with a browser.