a webdriver instance has the page_source
property, which contains the current page's source.
for example:
from selenium import webdriver
browser = webdriver.Firefox()
browser.get('http://example.com')
print browser.page_source
browser.quit()
I don't know is how to minimize the amount of requests I'm making to the website.
Reading the driver's page_source
just fetches it from the browser, so no additional http request is made to the server.
As an aside, is there a rule of thumb as to how many requests are too many, in say, a 24 hour period?
Do you own the site or is it someone else's public facing site? If it's yours, follow your hosting providers bandwidth limits, and your hardware limits. If you don't own it, follow the site's terms of service and respect their robots.txt. (This is probably best answered as a seperate question)