HTTP Speed Meter

This is very simple, I wanted to know which was the fastest HTTP client for Javascript. I went to Google and searched for something like "Compare HTTP clients for Javascript" and I found this page. Pretty useful information about the projects, but nothing on performance and/or speed, but I took the list of competitors and bookmarked it to get back later, after I run my tests.

Usage

Since is not a dependency, I didn't publish it on NPM, so you'll have to clone or download the repository in order to try it.

Once you are done cloning/downloading, install the project dependencies:

npm install --production

Use the --production argument to avoid installing the linting and testing dependencies.

Ok, now run it:

npm start

You should see something like this:

HTTP Speed Meter - Average Results

    Target URL: https://api.github.com/users/homer0/repos
    Iterations: 1

    Test: JSON

    superagent@3.5.2       █ 1.3s
    node-fetch@1.7.1       █ 1.4s
    request@2.81.0         ████ 1.9s
    axios@0.16.2           █████████████ 2.4s
    reqwest@2.0.5          █████████████████████ 2.9s
    request-promise@4.2.1  ███████ 2s
    got@7.1.0              █ 1.4s


    Test: Text

    superagent@3.5.2       █ 1.3s
    node-fetch@1.7.1       █ 1.6s
    request@2.81.0         ████████ 2.1s
    axios@0.16.2           ████████████████████████ 3s
    reqwest@2.0.5          ██████ 2s
    request-promise@4.2.1  █████████████████████████████████ 3.6s
    got@7.1.0              █████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████ 5.9s

And that's all; yes, speed is not everything and you should also have in mind all the features a client/library may have, but for this test I wanted just to see which was the fastest.

Options

I added a few options so you can play around

Custom URL

By default, I relay on a Github URL, and even if the restriction for non-authenticated requests is 60 per hour, it was good enough for my tests; if you want to run the tests against a another URL, just send it as an argument of npm start:

npm start -- --url=http://batman-rulz.com

Iterations

You may have noticed on the output title that it says "Average" and "Iterations", well, that's because you the result is the average time of all the iterations a test made. By default, the number of iterations is 1, but like with the custom URL, you can send a parameter to overwrite it:

npm start -- --iterations=20

Specific test

By default it runs all the tests it founds, but if you want to try just one, use the --test argument:

npm start -- --test=axios

Development

First of all, install all the dependencies (if you haven't done it yet) and run npm run install-hooks, then:

• If you want to add a new test: Create a new file on /src/tests and follow the example of the other tests: The test and testJSON methods, the name getter and .run() your file at the end of the file. Don't forget to add the dependency on the package.json!.
• If you want to modify the output/reporter: There's an NPM task called mock, good to the package.json and take a look. It starts the process but with mocked results, so you don't have to make real requests while changing rainbow of output you are writing.

Finally, and I didn't mentioned earlier because the hooks are there for a reason, you have the npm run link and npm test for the linting and the unit tests.