Blog O’ Matty

Measuring website latency with http_ping

A year or so ago, I modified my ldap-ping.pl script to create a script (http-ping.pl) that would measure the time it took to retrieve a specific URI from a web server. While scouring the OpenBSD ports collection for website monitoring tools, I came across http_ping. This is a great tool for measuring the time it takes to retrieve a URI, and is a far superior tool to the one I wrote. Here is an example of http_ping in action:

$ http_ping http://prefetch.net/

6220 bytes from http://prefetch.net/: 290.232 ms (79.652c/89.816r/120.764d)
6220 bytes from http://prefetch.net/: 281.06 ms (70.564c/90.036r/120.46d)
6220 bytes from http://prefetch.net/: 281.274 ms (70.968c/89.61r/120.696d)
6220 bytes from http://prefetch.net/: 290.858 ms (80.459c/89.81r/120.589d)
^C
--- http://prefetch.net/ http_ping statistics ---
4 fetches started, 4 completed (100%), 0 failures (0%), 0 timeouts (0%)
total    min/avg/max = 281.06/285.856/290.858 ms
connect  min/avg/max = 70.564/75.4108/80.459 ms
response min/avg/max = 89.61/89.818/90.036 ms
data     min/avg/max = 120.46/120.627/120.764 ms

There are all kinds of nifty pieces of software stashed away in the OpenBSD ports collection, and I am on a mission to locate and blog about each and every one of them! :)