curl – use variables to show response times and other parameters

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curl is a tool to interact with a server for transferring data. Although it supports various protocols, it is most commonly used with HTTP/S. It is sort of a browser for CLI folks and a go to tool when writing scripts to interact with servers.

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In addition to transferring data, how do we show request and response parameters with curl. The answer is using variables, the complete list of variables can be found here.

Example – use “time_total” to show the total time, in seconds, that the full operation lasted.

$ curl  -w %{time_total} https://www.gcplinux.com
1.149143

It is best to add the variables in a file and use curl to reference the file for better formatting. Here I have added several http request and response variables I am interested in, such as num_connects, size_download, size_header, time_namelookup, time_pretransfer etc.

daniel@hidmo:/tmp$ cat ccurl.txt 
      url_effective:  %{url_effective}\n
       content_type:  %{content_type}\n
          http_code:  %{http_code}\n
       http_version:  %{http_version}\n
       num_connects:  %{num_connects}\n
      num_redirects:  %{num_redirects}\n
          remote_ip:  %{remote_ip}\n
      size_download:  %{size_download}\n
        size_header:  %{size_header}\n
    time_namelookup:  %{time_namelookup}\n
       time_connect:  %{time_connect}\n
    time_appconnect:  %{time_appconnect}\n
   time_pretransfer:  %{time_pretransfer}\n
      time_redirect:  %{time_redirect}\n
 time_starttransfer:  %{time_starttransfer}\n
                    ----------\n
         time_total:  %{time_total}\n


daniel@hidmo:/tmp$ curl -H 'Cache-Control: no-cache' -L -w "@ccurl.txt" -o /dev/null -s https://www.gcplinux.com
      url_effective:  https://gcplinux.com/
       content_type:  text/html; charset=UTF-8
          http_code:  200
       http_version:  1.1
       num_connects:  2
      num_redirects:  1
          remote_ip:  162.247.79.246
      size_download:  71273
        size_header:  537
    time_namelookup:  0.008585
       time_connect:  0.082511
    time_appconnect:  0.264110
   time_pretransfer:  0.264293
      time_redirect:  1.287257
 time_starttransfer:  3.077526
                    ----------
         time_total:  3.177939

As far as time related parameters, listed below are the ones you will most likely use –

• time_appconnect The time, in seconds, it took from the start until the SSL/SSH/etc connect/handshake to the remote host was completed. (Added in 7.19.0)
• time_connect The time, in seconds, it took from the start until the TCP connect to the remote host (or proxy) was completed.
• time_namelookup The time, in seconds, it took from the start until the name resolving was completed.
• time_pretransfer The time, in seconds, it took from the start until the file transfer was just about to begin. This includes all pre-transfer commands and negotiations that are specific to the particular protocol(s) involved.
• time_redirect The time, in seconds, it took for all redirection steps including name lookup, connect, pretransfer and transfer before the final transaction was started. time_redirect shows the complete execution time for multiple redirections. (Added in 7.12.3)
• time_starttransfer The time, in seconds, it took from the start until the first byte was just about to be transferred. This includes time_pretransfer and also the time the server needed to calculate the result.
• time_total The total time, in seconds, that the full operation lasted.

References –

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https://curl.haxx.se/docs/manpage.html

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/18215389/how-do-i-measure-request-and-response-times-at-once-using-curl