twitter - python: [Errno 10054] An existing connection was forcibly closed by the remote host

Question

I am writing python to crawl Twitter space using Twitter-py. I have set the crawler to sleep for a while (2 seconds) between each request to api.twitter.com. However, after some times of running (around 1), when the Twitter's rate limit not exceeded yet, I got this error.

[Errno 10054] An existing connection was forcibly closed by the remote host.

What are possible causes of this problem and how to solve this?

I have searched through and found that the Twitter server itself may force to close the connection due to many requests.

Thank you very much in advance.

Answer 1

This can be caused by the two sides of the connection disagreeing over whether the connection timed out or not during a keepalive. (Your code tries to reused the connection just as the server is closing it because it has been idle for too long.) You should basically just retry the operation over a new connection. (I'm surprised your library doesn't do this automatically.)