cURL Response Time How I measure Response Times of Web APIs using curl

#curl

Why `curl`?

There is a bunch of specific tools for benchmarking HTTP requests.
ab, JMeter, wrk...
Then why still use curl for the purpose?

It's because curl is widely-used and it's a kind of common language for Web Developers.

Also, some tools have a feature to retrieve an HTTP request as a curl command.

It's quite useful because it copies not only the URL and parameters but also request headers including Authorization or Cookie.

Tools

In this article, I use these tools:

Measure response time using `curl`

At first, let's prepare a curl command. In this time, I got the command of the request to my personal blog using Google Chrome. (Cookie is removed)

$ curl 'https://blog.yuyat.jp/' -H 'Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate, sdch' -H 'Accept-Language: en-US,en;q=0.8,ja;q=0.6' -H 'Upgrade-Insecure-Requests: 1' -H 'User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_11_4) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/50.0.2661.86 Safari/537.36' -H 'Connection: keep-alive' --compressed

It just outputs the response body from the server.

Let's append these options.

-s -o /dev/null -w  "%{time_starttransfer}\n"

-s is to silence the progress, -o is to dispose the response body to /dev/null.

And what is important is -w.
We can specify a variety of format and in this time I used time_starttransfer to retrieve the response time (time to first byte).

It shows like below:

$ curl 'https://blog.yuyat.jp/' -H 'Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate, sdch' -H 'Accept-Language: en-US,en;q=0.8,ja;q=0.6' -H 'Upgrade-Insecure-Requests: 1' -H 'User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_11_4) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/50.0.2661.86 Safari/537.36' -H 'Connection: keep-alive' --compressed -s -o /dev/null -w  "%{time_starttransfer}\n"
0.188947

The response time is 0.188947 second (188 msec).

To simplify, I also created a wrapper command curlb:

#!/bin/sh
curl -s -o /dev/null -w '%{time_starttransfer}\n' "$@"

Measure the percentile of the response times

It's not proper to benchmark from just a single request.

Then let's measure the percentile of 100 requests.

ntimes is useful for such purposes.

https://github.com/yuya-takeyama/ntimes

You can install with go get github.com/yuya-takeyama/ntimes or the repository has pre-built binaries.

Let's append ntimes 100 -- at the beginning of the curl command.

$ ntimes 100 -- curlb 'https://blog.yuyat.jp/' -H 'Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate, sdch' -H 'Accept-Language: en-US,en;q=0.8,ja;q=0.6' -H 'Upgrade-Insecure-Requests: 1' -H 'User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_11_4) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/50.0.2661.86 Safari/537.36' -H 'Connection: keep-alive' --compressed
0.331915
0.064085
0.059883
0.074047
0.059774
...

And to measure the percentile of the numbers, the command called percentile may be the easiest option.

https://github.com/yuya-takeyama/percentile

Install it by go get github.com/yuya-takeyama/percentile or download the pre-built binary from the repo.

And append | percentile to the end of the command.

$ ntimes 100 -- curlb 'https://blog.yuyat.jp/' -H 'Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate, sdch' -H 'Accept-Language: en-US,en;q=0.8,ja;q=0.6' -H 'Upgrade-Insecure-Requests: 1' -H 'User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_11_4) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/50.0.2661.86 Safari/537.36' -H 'Connection: keep-alive' --compressed | percentile
50%:    0.061777
66%:    0.06412
75%:    0.06872300000000001
80%:    0.07029000000000001
90%:    0.07496700000000001
95%:    0.076153
98%:    0.077226
99%:    0.07957
100%:   0.109931

That's it!

Latest comments (6)

Zeyuan Chen • Feb 1 '20

Hi! Is it possible to use your tool on Mac?
If so, how to install the ntimes?

Bjoern • Nov 13 '19

This was an interesting post and I got curious to see how this measures up against how we record response time with our product templarbit.com/sonar and found that it works similar!