running parallelHttp requests using typhoeus with Hydra in ruby

Question

I was going through http://typhoeus.github.com/articles/getting_started.html#making_parallel_requests and I couldn't actually understand how does typhoeus with Hydra achieve in making parallel HTTP requests possible. Is it similar to EventMachine::Iterator and EvenMachine::HTTPRequest handle concurrent requests? I am planning to go through its source code, but if anyone already knows what is going on at the back end please enlighten me. It will help me a lot to understand Typhoeus better. Thanks!

Answer 1

Typhoeus is a libcurl wrapper and doesn't do parallel requests itself. But is provides an interface to libcurls multi: http://curl.haxx.se/libcurl/c/libcurl-multi.html which takes care of doing parallel requests. That makes it different from Eventmachine, because libcurl does the heavy lifting so you don't have to worry about your ruby code.

To be even more precise, Typhoeus(since 0.5.0.alpha) uses Ethon: https://github.com/typhoeus/ethon instead dealing with libcurl on its own. If you want to see how Ethon works with libcurls multi, this is a good starting point: https://github.com/typhoeus/ethon/blob/master/lib/ethon/multi.rb.

In case you want to know whats really going on, you should look into libcurl itself.