Blog O’ Matty

Measuring website latency

While reading a slew of information on web application monitoring, I came across echoping. This nifty little utility allows you to measure the time it takes to ping a server, perform an SMTP exchange with a mail server, or to request a URI from a web server. The following example uses the echoping “-h” (URI to fetch) option to measure the time it takes to request a URI from the prefetch.net web server:

$ echoping -v -4 -h /code/ssl-cert-check prefetch.net:80

This is echoping, version 5.2.0.

Trying to connect to internet address 66.148.84.65 80 to transmit 111 bytes...
Trying to send 256 bytes to internet address 66.148.84.65...
Connected...
TCP Latency: 0.025887 seconds
Sent (111 bytes)...
Application Latency: 0.032952 seconds
7075 bytes read from server.
Elapsed time: 0.092921 seconds

To measure the time it takes to complete an SMTP transaction with mail.prefetch.net, smokeping’s “-S” (perform SMTP exchange) option can be used:

$ echoping -v -4 -S mail.prefetch.net

This is echoping, version 5.2.0.

Trying to connect to internet address 206.222.17.179 25 to transmit 6 bytes...
Trying to send 256 bytes to internet address 206.222.17.179...
Connected...
TCP Latency: 0.051737 seconds
Sent (6 bytes)...
Application Latency: 0.052778 seconds
30 bytes read from server.
Elapsed time: 0.107167 seconds

echoping supports TLS and SSL, and the data generated by echoping can be graphed with cacti or smokeping.