Configuration

TLS Protocol Version

Industry best practices, and some regulations, require the use of TLS 1.1 or newer. Though no application changes are required for Motor to make use of the newest protocols, some operating systems or versions may not provide an OpenSSL version new enough to support them.

Users of macOS older than 10.13 (High Sierra) will need to install Python from python.org, homebrew, macports, or another similar source.

Users of Linux or other non-macOS Unix can check their OpenSSL version like this:

$ openssl version

If the version number is less than 1.0.1 support for TLS 1.1 or newer is not available. Contact your operating system vendor for a solution or upgrade to a newer distribution.

You can check your Python interpreter by installing the requests module and executing the following command:

python -c "import requests; print(requests.get('https://www.howsmyssl.com/a/check', verify=False).json()['tls_version'])"

You should see “TLS 1.X” where X is >= 1.

You can read more about TLS versions and their security implications in this cheat sheet.

Thread Pool Size

Motor uses the Python standard library’s ThreadPoolExecutor to defer network operations to threads. By default, the executor uses at most five threads per CPU core on your system; to override the default set the environment variable MOTOR_MAX_WORKERS.

Some additional threads are used for monitoring servers and background tasks, so the total count of threads in your process will be greater.

Network Compression

Like PyMongo, Motor supports network compression where network traffic between the client and MongoDB server are compressed. Keyword arguments to the Motor clients match those in MongoClient, documented here. By default no compression is used. If you wish to use wire compression, you will have to install one of the optional dependencies. Snappy requires python-snappy and zstandard requires zstandard:

$ python3 -m pip install "motor[snappy, zstd]"