HTTP Test

A simple C client program testing HTTP connection.

1. Compile

Linux + make + gcc

$ make

2. Usage

$ ./HTTPTest --url <example.com> --profile <number_of_repeats> [--help] [--brief | --verbose]

3. Options

Required:

-u or --url

Specify target domain name. Only support this style: www.example.com/index or http://www.example.com/index
-p or --profile

Specify how many runs the test should repeat

Optional:

--help Show help info
--verbose (default) Print debug info and full response
--brief Brief mode only prints error coce and result stats

4. Testing

After parsing command line arguments and initialization, we start the test loop.

For each regular iteration, we start the timer, open a socket and connect to the server, write a hard-coded request header to socket, receive response, then stop timer and go next run. We also record the size of response. If anything bad happened or we did not get a 200 OK response, then this run is counted as failure, otherwise it is a success.

5. Some Results

We ran the test against follwing 3 URLs with 1000 repeats each:

www.google.com
my-worker.suzx917.worker.dev (deployed worker in General Assignment)
httpbin.org/anything (a test website)

The results (rounded to nearest integer) are following (also see screenshots folder):

Test	Fastest(ms)	Slowest(ms)	Mean(ms)	Median(ms)	Largest	Smallest(KB)	Success(%)
1	93	78201	210	127	48	47	100
2	82	536	121	99	1	1	100
3	87	22204	131	102	10	19	100

The packets from my-worker are very small because they are refresh instructions (http-equiv="refresh"). Presumably some caching technology comes into play.

Most popular websites (such as YouTube, Twitter, GitHub) only support an HTTPS visit and our program gets a 301 or 302 which redirects to thier https link. Due to limited schedule, SSL connection is not implemented for this project.