[Blog #4] Need For Speed

anubhavp
Published: 07/24/2019

<meta charset="utf-8">Hey! This is my fifth blog post for GSoC 2019, covering week 7 and 8.

The most of week 7 was spent making Protego compatible with Google's parser. I also worked on the documentation, since Protego codebase is small enough, proper comments and a good readme was sufficient. I uploaded Protego to PyPI - `pip install Protego` that's all it takes to install Protego. 

Week 8 was quite interesting. For Protego to become default in Scrapy, it is necessary that it doesn’t throw any kind of error while parsing `robots.txt` files. To make sure that, I decided to download `robots.txt` from top 10,000 websites. I added tests to see if Protego throws any exceptions while parsing the downloaded `robots.txt`. I benchmarked Protego, and the results were quite disappointing. You can see the result here. 

We decided to spend the next week improving performance of Protego. I am going to try profiling and heuristics, and see if the performance can be improved.

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