A more memory-efficient `HttpResponseProvider`

[BurnzZ]

https://github.com/scrapinghub/scrapy-poet/blob/master/scrapy_poet/page_input_providers.py#L165-L180

Currently, the HttpResponseProvider creates a new HttpResponse instance each time it's called:

class HttpResponseProvider(PageObjectInputProvider, CacheDataProviderMixin):
    """This class provides ``web_poet.page_inputs.HttpResponse`` instances."""

    provided_classes = {HttpResponse}
    name = "response_data"

    def __call__(self, to_provide: Set[Callable], response: Response):
        """Builds a ``HttpResponse`` instance using a Scrapy ``Response``"""
        return [
            HttpResponse(
                url=response.url,
                body=response.body,
                status=response.status,
                headers=HttpResponseHeaders.from_bytes_dict(response.headers),
            )
        ]

From another thread:

Suppose the average HTML size for a particular website is 256 KB. Let's also suppose that we have 12 POs that we need to support in our MultiLayoutPage subclass. This means that for every multi layout PO instance, it holds at least 256 KB * 12 = 3 MB in memory. Assuming that we're parsing at a rate of 10 pages per second, then we're holding at least 3 MB * 10 pages = 30 MB of memory per second.

It's not a crucial issue for now but it can certainly be made more efficient by having the provider return the same HttpResponse instance given a response identifier. HttpResponseProvider already inherits from CacheDataProviderMixin. Perhaps we can use an in-memory cache to determine if we can return the same instance instead of creating a new one.

[kmike]

hey @BurnzZ! I'm not sure it's going to be an issue. The largest field in HttpResponse is response.body, and it's an immutable byte string, which shouldn't be copied multiple times even if you create several HttpResponse instances.

Though maybe you're right, as we're converting it to HttpResponseBody instances. I'm not sure what's Python behavior in this case.

[BurnzZ]

The largest field in HttpResponse is response.body, and it's an immutable byte string, which shouldn't be copied multiple times even if you create several HttpResponse instances.

I think the byte string is still copied over by value and not by reference:

from web_poet import HttpResponse

text = b"Hello World"

r1 = HttpResponse(url="example.com", body=text)
r2 = HttpResponse(url="example.com", body=text)

r1.body == r2.body  # True

r1.body is r2.body          # False
id(r1.body) == id(r2.body)  # False

I think it has something to do with HttpResponse being an attrs dataclass.

If we define it as something like the following, then the object reference is used:

class HttpResponse:
    def __init__(self, url, body):
        self.url = url
        self.body = body

text = b"Hello World"

r1 = HttpResponse(url="example.com", body=text)
r2 = HttpResponse(url="example.com", body=text)

r1.body == r2.body  # True

r1.body is r2.body          # True
id(r1.body) == id(r2.body)  # True

So I guess one approach is to modify how we define HttpResponse.

[kmike]

I think it has something to do with HttpResponse being an attrs dataclass.

It could be more about HttpResponseBody objects created from the response.body passed to HttpResponse.__init__