Waldemar’s blog

HTTP POST or GET

January 27th, 2009

3 comments

Some time ago I made a little test comparing web services performance using HTTP GET and POST methods. I used the same script, in the same environment with the same web service. HTTP method was the only difference.

I discovered that POST method is twice much faster than request sent using GET method.
You should also know that request size with GET method can be limited, although RFC2616 says:

The HTTP protocol does not place any a priori limit on the length of
   a URI. Servers MUST be able to handle the URI of any resource they
   serve, and SHOULD be able to handle URIs of unbounded length if they
   provide GET-based forms that could generate such URIs.

So if you are planning some web services performance testing or you want to speed up your tests a little bit before customer demo you should consider POST HTTP method.

General HTTP POST GET performance web services

Web Services performance using LoadRunner HTTP Vuser script

January 24th, 2009

35 comments

Small (basic) example howto test performance of Web Service using LoadRunner API.

Let say we have a web services that uses SOAP over HTTP. We want to check how fast we can send a request and receive a response. Because our service uses HTTP as a transport protocol, we are able to test it using simple HTTP Vuser script.

Here is the C code:

Action()
{
   web_reg_save_param("Response","LB=", "RB=", LAST);
   web_add_header("SOAPAction", "SampleMethod");
   lr_start_transaction("REQ");
   web_custom_request("Sample_Request","Method=POST",
         "Mode=HTML",
         "RecContentType=text/xml",
         "EncType=text/xml; charset=utf-8",
         "URL=http://example.com:1234/sample/",
         "Body=<Envelope xmlns=\"http://example.com/sample\">\n"
               "   <Header/>\n"
               "   <Body>\n"
               "      <price><id>001</id></price>\n"
               "   </Body>\n"
               "</Envelope>",
   "LAST");
   lr_end_transaction("REQ", LR_AUTO);
   lr_output_message("Response is : %s\n", lr_eval_string("{Response}"));
   return 0;
}