Linux Networking Cookbook

19.5. Testing HTTP Throughput and Latency with httping

Problem

As always, your users are complaining "the web site is too slow! We're dying here!" But it seems OK to you. Isn't there some way you can make some objective measurements without having to master some expensive, complicated analysis tool?

Solution

While sophisticated HTTP server analysis tools are nice, and there are dozens of them, sometimes you just want something quick and easy. httping is an excellent utility for measuring HTTP server throughput and latency, and because it's a tiny command-line tool, you can easily run it from multiple locations via SSH.

Its simplest invocation is to test latency:

	$ httping -c4 -g http://www.oreilly.com
	PING www.oreilly.com:80 (http://www.oreilly.com):
	connected to www.oreilly.com:80, seq=0 time=177.37 ms
	connected to www.oreilly.com:80, seq=1 time=170.28 ms
	connected to www.oreilly.com:80, seq=2 time=165.71 ms
	connected to www.oreilly.com:80, seq=3 time=179.51 ms
	--- http://www.oreilly.com ping statistics ---
	4 connects, 4 ok, 0.00% failed
	round-trip min/avg/max = 165.7/173.2/179.5 ms

That's not too bad. This doesn't tell you how long it takes pages to load, only how long it takes the server to respond to a HEAD request, which means fetching only the page headers without the content. So, let's do a GET (-G) request, which fetches the whole page:

	$ httping -c4 -Gg http://www.oreilly.com PING www.oreilly.com:80 (http://www.oreilly.com): connected to www.oreilly.com:80, seq=0 time=1553.78 ...