Addons using requests are very slow on Raspberry Pi

dag · May 3, 2019 at 1:50 PM

We discovered that addons using the **requests** library are very slow on Raspberry Pi.

This appears to be related to the fact that importing the requests library takes up 4 seconds.

You can find more information at:

- Importing requests very slow (4 seconds) on Raspberry Pi · Issue #5080 · kennethreitz/requests · GitHub

- Importing requests very slow on Raspberry Pi · Issue #25 · Freso/script.module.requests · GitHub

- Addon is quite slow on Raspberry Pi · Issue #169 · pietje666/plugin.video.vrt.nu · GitHub

Have other people noticed this ?

Unfortunately the Kodi repositories only hosts up to 2 versions of a module, so it is hard to go back to find when this was introduced.

dag · May 4, 2019 at 2:51 AM

The cause as been pinpointed to an update of script.module.urllib3 from 1.24.1 to 1.25 about a week ago.

Going back to the earlier script.module.urllib3 release fixes the problem.

script.module.urllib3-1.24.1.zip

gedakc · May 4, 2019 at 6:12 PM

What are the steps to roll back to the older script.module.urllib3 version 1.24.x and how does one prevent this library from upgrading automatically?

EDIT: It looks like there is a new urllib3 v1.24.3 according to this report URLlib 1.24.1 vulnerable to CVE-2019-11324 (rated CVSS 7.5 High).

zosky · May 7, 2019 at 3:22 AM

thanks for figuring out what's going on

Quote from dag

We discovered that addons using the **requests** library are very slow on Raspberry Pi.

This appears to be related to the fact that importing the requests library takes up 4 seconds.

my hand rolled surround sound controller addon got smashed by this.

after some debugging i came to the same conclusion a few days ago.

rpi3 on LE 8* was snappy (~2s) on 9.0.1 it takes ~7sec.

- vol up/down keys are bound to "runScript(myVol, direction)"

- it does one POST, direction ... the plain/text reply [0-100] is displayed in a slider.nob

- all logic is handled serverSide in nodeRed

i need the wife to be happy now

so i'm temporarily using v = subprocess.check_output([ "curl", "-X", "POST", "-d", "up" ... ])

gedakc · June 7, 2019 at 6:04 PM

There has been some work implemented in script.module.urllib3 version 1.25.3 that significantly improves upon this slowdown issue. See PR #55 - Remove excess IRI matcher compilation.

If you have Kodi automatic updates enabled then this component has probably already updated to the latest version.

If you have Kodi automatic updates disabled then you can manually install script.module.urllib3 version 1.25.3 with the following steps which assume the Confluence skin - should be similar with other skins:

1. Navigate to System -> Settings -> Add-ons -> Available updates.

2. Choose urllib3 and follow the prompts to Update to version 1.25.3.

Thanks goes to the persons who identified this issue and those who worked to resolve the issue.

EDIT: For more details see the ongoing discussion starting here.