S3 parallel downloader

s3pd is both a python library and a command line tool to download files from S3 in parallel.

Compared to e.g. boto3, s3pd is able to efficiently download chunks of files in parallel, resulting in a x5 to x10 download speed compared to AWSCLI / boto.

Installation

$ pip install s3pd

Usage: CLI

$ s3pd --help
Download S3 files concurrently.

Usage:
    s3pd [options] <SOURCE> [<DESTINATION>]

Options:
    -p,--processes=<PROCESSES>      Number of concurrent download processes
                                    [default: 4]
    -c,--chunksize=<CHUNKSIZE>      Size of chunks for each worker, in bytes
                                    [default: 8388608]
    -u,--unsigned                   Use unsigned requests

The destination argument is optional. In this case, the file will be downloaded temporarily in a shared memory. This is useful if you do not want the file itself, but just benchmark the download speed.

The proper values for chunksize and processes depends a lot on your setup. For huge files on AWS, I would recommend 64/128/512MB chunksize with 16 processes for near good performance (tested on VPC endpoints to reach ~1GB/s).

Usage: python library

The main entry point of the library is the s3pd function.

s3pd(url, processes=8, chunksize=67108864, destination=None, func=None, signed=True)

• url: an URL using the s3 scheme, such as s3://bucket/key/to/file.
• processes: number of concurrent download processes.
• chunksize: size of each download chunk (in bytes).
• signed: used signed or unsigned requests.
• destination: destination filename where the file will be downloaded. Mutually exclusive with the func parameter.
• func: when this is provided, the file will be downloaded to a shared memory, the provided function applied on the filename, and the temporary file destroyed. This is particularly useful when you want to transparently load a file from S3 and process it without keeping the file (and your API only support filenames and not fileobjs).

Example

Download a huge file from S3 using 16 processes and 64MB chunksize:

from s3pd import s3pd

store = s3pd(url='s3://bucket/key/to/file.h5', chunksize=64*1024*1024, processes=16, func=pd.HDFStore)

Author

• Aurelien Vallee <vallee.aurelien@gmail.com>