Best Test Request

Figuring out the most efficient method to send requests to test web servers.

Context

I've been experimenting with various ways to try and speed up COMP1531's test runners, and also check how the performance of various other request-related things relate.

Findings

Here's a link to the results.

• Using sync-request is about 5x slower than using the fetch API.
• Python is about twice as slow as JS when sending real requests.
• When injecting fake requests using Flask's testing library (instead of sending real requests), performance improves by 5x.
• If we can find a library to inject fake requests into Express, we may be able to get a similar performance improvement, meaning the improvement would be 25x compared to using sync-request.

Usage

Here's how you can run the benchmarks on your own machine.

Note: I'm using Poetry as the dependency management tool for Python. You'll need to install it.

1. Install Python dependencies with poetry install
2. Install JS dependencies with npm install
3. Run the test script with poetry run python runner.py

You can use --progress to get a live counter (so you know it hasn't broken)

You can also customise the particular variations that are run by editing runner.py.

List of variations

Flask

Run server using poetry run python -m flask_app

All combinations of:

Request strategy

• requests library to send requests
• flask.testing library to send fake requests

Request method

• GET with query string
• POST with JSON

JSON encoder

• Flask's jsonify function
• Standard json library

Express

Run server using npm start

All combinations of:

Request strategy

• sync-request to send requests
• Node's built-in fetch to send requests

Request method

• GET with query string
• POST with JSON