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HTTP POST or GET

January 27th, 2009
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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.

  1. Stuart Moncrieff
    February 23rd, 2009 at 10:35 | #1
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    Hmmm. Interesting experiment. What was the software stack the web service was running on?

    I would argue that a GET request that contains a body is malformed. Section 9.3 of RFC 2616 says that GET data should be in the Request-URI.

    I am surprised that your web service even accepts a GET request with a body, even if it is much slower. I just tried it with a web service running on ASP.NET 2.0.50727, and the request is not accepted as a web servie call.

    Cheers,
    Stuart.

  2. admin
    February 23rd, 2009 at 11:26 | #2
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    Stuart
    You are right. My server (Java, Jax-WS) doesn’t accept GET requests as well. I realized that I made a mistake :/ It’s throwing 404 and thats why performance is better, agrrrr…

    I need to delete this stupid post.
    Thanks for catching it.

    Waldemar

  3. Stuart Moncrieff
    February 23rd, 2009 at 23:29 | #3
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    But it is also interesting that an HTTP 404 response is much slower than a web service response.

    I find that a lot of websites have missing resources on pages that developers refuse to fix because it is not visible to an end-user. Maybe there are performance implications under heavy load.

    Also, there is probably a lesson in there somewhere about always putting in web_reg_finds for every request. :)

    I am enjoying reading your blog. Keep up the interesting posts.

    Cheers,
    Stuart.

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