Question

I have an application where I use requests to download .mp3 files from a server.

The code looks like this:

self.client = requests.session(headers={'User-Agent': self.useragent})

def download(self, url, name):
    request = self.client.get(url)

    with open(name, "wb") as code:
        code.write(request.content)

    print "done"

The problem is that when the download is finished, python does not clear the memory, so everytime I download an mp3, the memory usage of the application raises by the size of the mp3. The memory does not get cleared again, leading to my app using a lot of memory.

I assume this has to do with how I save the file, or how requests.session works.

Any suggestions.

Edit:
Here is the code:
https://github.com/Simon1988/VK-Downloader

The relevant part is in lib/vklib.py

Answer 1

You could try streaming the content in chunks:

def download(self, url, name):
    request = self.client.get(url, stream=True)  # `prefetch=False` for older
                                                 # versions of requests
    with open(name, "wb") as code:
        for chunk in request.iter_content(1024):
            if not chunk:
                break

            code.write(chunk)