Question

I have this test program which will fetch url parallel, but when I increase the parallel number to about 1040, I start to get lookup www.httpbin.org: no such host error.

After some Google, I found others say that not close the response will cause the problem, but I do close that with res.Body.Close().

What’s the problem here? thanks very much.

package main

import (
    "fmt"
    "net/http"
    "io/ioutil"
)

func get(url string) ([]byte, error) {

    client := &http.Client{}
    req, _ := http.NewRequest("GET", url, nil)

    res, err := client.Do(req)

    if err != nil {
        fmt.Println(err)
        return nil, err
    } 

    bytes, read_err := ioutil.ReadAll(res.Body)
    res.Body.Close()

    fmt.Println(bytes)

    return bytes, read_err
}

func main() {
    for i := 0; i < 1040; i++ {
        go get(fmt.Sprintf("http://www.httpbin.org/get?a=%d", i))
    }
}

Answer 1

That’s because you may have up to 1040 concurrent calls in your code so you may very well be in a state with 1040 body opened and none yet closed.

You need to limit the number of goroutines used.

Here’s one possible solution with a limit to 100 concurrent calls max :

func getThemAll() {
    nbConcurrentGet := 100
    urls :=  make(chan string, nbConcurrentGet)
    for i := 0; i < nbConcurrentGet; i++ {
        go func (){
            for url := range urls {
                get(url)
            }
        }()
    }
    for i:=0; i<1040; i++ {
        urls <- fmt.Sprintf("http://www.httpbin.org/get?a=%d", i)
    }
}

If you call this in the main function of your program, it may stop before all tasks are finished. You can use a sync.WaitGroup to prevent it :

func main() {
    nbConcurrentGet := 100
    urls :=  make(chan string, nbConcurrentGet)
    var wg sync.WaitGroup
    for i := 0; i < nbConcurrentGet; i++ {
        go func (){
            for url := range urls {
                get(url)
                wg.Done()
            }
        }()
    }
    for i:=0; i<1040; i++ {
        wg.Add(1)
        urls <- fmt.Sprintf("http://www.httpbin.org/get?a=%d", i)
    }
    wg.Wait()
    fmt.Println("Finished")
}