When using the simple requests calls, separate SSL session is negotiated for each request.
>>> import requests
>>> resp = requests.get('https://improvingwetware.com/favicon.ico') ; print(resp.elapsed, resp.status_code)
0:00:00.344494 200
>>> resp = requests.get('https://improvingwetware.com/favicon.ico') ; print(resp.elapsed, resp.status_code)
0:00:00.320507 200
>>>
To avoid this, and to get faster subsequent response times, you can create a session object that will then keep the connection alive (but the default keep-alive for Apache is only 5 seconds)
>>> s = requests.Session()
>>> resp = s.get('https://improvingwetware.com/favicon.ico') ; print(resp.elapsed, resp.status_code)
0:00:00.333475 200
>>> resp = s.get('https://improvingwetware.com/favicon.ico') ; print(resp.elapsed, resp.status_code)
0:00:00.105773 200
>>>
So by using the Session capabilities, subsequent https requests in a test suite can save the SSL negotiation cost, which on my laptop down to this blog server is of the order of 200ms. Not a massive saving, but when a test suite needs to hit an API 100 times to test out the various options, the difference is noticeable.