Performance Comparison: curl, php curl, php socket, python pycurl

I have a project, the module of which will work with another server most of the time, sending him GET requests.
I conducted tests to determine how to get the page faster (as part of the project’s proposed technologies).

The first 3 tests: each method performed 50 queries in a row to one site.




Let me explain that curl is getting a page with the curl console utility on Linux. All tests were conducted on Linux.
There was also a fifth test - calling curl from php via exec, but I dropped that stupidity.

If you average the tests, you get the following result:


Places:

1. php socket
2. curl
3. python pycurl
4. php curl

If you start from the lower value, the result changes:

1. php socket
2. php curl
3. python pycurl
4. curl

Console curl without JP doesn't interest me after such tests, but who is still faster than php + curl or python + pycurl? 4 more tests in which only this pair participated:



php honestly worked faster in all 4 tests.

Test results

Using curl library with simple GET requests
is almost 2 times lower execution speed compared to working through sockets.
In addition, we noticed that python with the pycurl library handles a little slower than php with curl.
Perhaps the tests are biased in something, if you think that this is so, justify in the comments.

Code for these tests

A small C program

It starts the program passed in the parameter and measures the time of its work in milliseconds.

#include 
#include 
struct timeval tv1, tv2, dtv;
struct timezone tz;
//time_ functions from http://ccfit.nsu.ru/~kireev/lab1/lab1time.htm
void time_start() 
{ 
	gettimeofday(&tv1, &tz); 
}
long time_stop()
{
	gettimeofday(&tv2, &tz);
	dtv.tv_sec= tv2.tv_sec -tv1.tv_sec;
	dtv.tv_usec=tv2.tv_usec-tv1.tv_usec;
	if(dtv.tv_usec < 0) 
	{ 
		dtv.tv_sec--; 
		dtv.tv_usec += 1000000; 
	}
    return dtv.tv_sec * 1000 + dtv.tv_usec / 1000;
}
int main(int argc, char **argv)
{	
	if(argc > 1)
	{
		time_start();
		system(argv[1]);
		printf("\nTime: %ld\n", time_stop());
	}
	else
		printf("Usage:\n timer1 command\n");	
	return 0;
}

Php

$t = 'http://www.2ip.ru/'; //target
for($i=0; $i < 50; $i++)
{
	$ch = curl_init();
	curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $t);
	curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, 1);
	curl_setopt($ch, CURLINFO_HEADER_OUT, 1);
	curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
	curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_USERAGENT, 'Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:17.0) Gecko/17.0 Firefox/17.0');
	curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_ENCODING, 'utf-8');
	curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_TIMEOUT, 200);
	curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYHOST, 0);
	curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER, 0);
	$data = curl_exec($ch);        
	curl_close($ch);
}

The fastest option (sockets)

$t = 'http://www.2ip.ru/'; //target
for($i=0; $i < 50; $i++)
{
	$service_port = 80;
	$address = gethostbyname('www.2ip.ru');
	$socket = socket_create(AF_INET, SOCK_STREAM, SOL_TCP);
	if ($socket === false) {
		echo "socket_create() failed: reason: " . socket_strerror(socket_last_error()) . "\n";
	} else {
		//echo "OK.\n";
	}
	$result = socket_connect($socket, $address, $service_port);
	if ($result === false) {
		echo "socket_connect() failed.\nReason: ($result) " . socket_strerror(socket_last_error($socket)) . "\n";
	} else {
		//echo "OK.\n";
	}
	$in = "GET / HTTP/1.1\r\n";
	$in .= "Host: www.example.com\r\n";
	$in .= "Connection: Close\r\n\r\n";
	$out = '';
	$r = '';
	socket_write($socket, $in, strlen($in));
	while ($out = socket_read($socket, 2048)) {
		$r .= $out;
	}
	socket_close($socket);
	//echo $r;
}

Python

import pycurl
import cStringIO
for i in range(50):
	buf = cStringIO.StringIO()
	c = pycurl.Curl()
	c.setopt(c.URL, 'http://www.2ip.ru/')
	c.setopt(c.WRITEFUNCTION, buf.write)
	c.perform()
	#print buf.getvalue()
	buf.close()

Bash scripts

To run curl:

#!/bin/bash
testdir="/home/developer/Desktop/tests"
i=0
while [ $i -lt 50 ]
do
  curl -s -o "$testdir/tmp_some_file" "http://www.2ip.ru/"
  let i=i+1
done

To run all tests:

#!/bin/bash
testdir="/home/developer/Desktop/tests"
echo "php curl"
"$testdir/timer1" "php $testdir/testCurl.php"
echo "curl to file"
"$testdir/timer1" "bash $testdir/curl2file.sh"
#echo "curl to file (php)"
#"$testdir/timer1" "php $testdir/testCurl2.php"
echo "php socket"
"$testdir/timer1" "php $testdir/testCurl3.php"
echo "python pycurl"
"$testdir/timer1" "python $testdir/1.py"