third_example.py

import threading
from contextlib import suppress
from functools import partial
from urllib.error import URLError
from urllib.request import urlopen

from first_example import timeit

links = [
    "http://www.google.com/",
    "http://www.youtube.com/",
    "http://www.apple.com/",
    "http://www.linkedin.com/",
    "http://www.microsoft.com/",
    "http://www.blogger.com/",
    "http://www.support.google.com/",
    "http://www.play.google.com/",
    "http://www.cloudflare.com/",
    "http://plus.google.com/",
    "http://en.wikipedia.org/",
    "http://maps.google.com/",
    "http://wordpress.org/",
    "http://docs.google.com/",
]


def task(link):
    with suppress(URLError):
        contents = urlopen(link).read()


def run_tasks_synchronous():
    for link in links:
        task(link)


def run_tasks_threaded():
    threads = []

    # Create and start threads
    for link in links:
        t = threading.Thread(target=partial(task, link), daemon=True)
        t.start()
        threads.append(t)

    # Wait all to finish
    for t in threads:
        t.join()


timeit(run_tasks_synchronous)
timeit(run_tasks_threaded)