https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=55889
--- Comment #2 from Strainu crangasi2001@yahoo.com --- As I understand it, I/O happens outside of GIL. As the API requests are the most time-consuming part of many of my robots (and more precisely the connection to the servers), being able to do requests from several threads should somewhat improve performance (as long as the throttling is not too aggressive).
I've noticed that the preloading limit is not only 50 pages, making this problem even more stringent for many small pages. It's probably also a good idea for things like image upload/download.
If it helps, we can do some tests to see if performance is increased for a simple file downloader?