Beyond Requests: Why httpx is the Modern HTTP Client You Need (Sometimes)

The Python library httpx is presented as a modern alternative to the popular requests library for making HTTP calls, offering both synchronous and asynchronous APIs along with HTTP/2 support. Through a series of performance tests, httpx demonstrates superior speed even in synchronous, sequential operations. The primary advantage is highlighted in concurrent, I/O-bound tasks, where httpx's asynchronous capabilities allow it to complete 100 requests in a fraction of the time taken by the synchronous requests library. This makes httpx a fundamentally more efficient choice for applications requiring high concurrency, such as interacting with multiple microservices or web scraping.