Python® Create-Modify-Reuse

Chapter 4. Web Performance Tester

So far, the programs we've written have been useful, but they've shared one main limitation — they are largely self contained, intended to be run on a single computer (although the database program could certainly have a database housed on another computer). Our next program will change that.

The Web Performance Tester has two main functions (I use "function" in the generic sense here):

• It will use Python's urllib2 module to emulate a web browser, access several well-known web sites, and report the amount of time it took to get back the HTML from the page accessed. It will also write its results to a log file, which can be accessed later.

• It will communicate with a simple Python web server on another machine on the computer's internal network, download a text file and a binary file (through HTTP), and report the results. It will record the results in a logfile.

Why Is This Application Important?

Much of the work done by computers is done over networks. Whether it is browsing web pages, connecting to terminal servers via telnet, downloading files via FTP, or performing some other network task, connecting to other computers is one of the most vital tasks a computer performs today.

Using Python, you can act as a server for many of the most popular Internet protocols: HTTP (Web), FTP (File Transfer), Telnet (Remote login), SMTP (Mail service), and SNMP (Network Management), just to name a few.

This application demonstrates how to use Python and its rich collection ...