Why is the GET method faster than POST in HTTP?

Question

I am new to web programming and just curious to know about the GET and POST methods of sending data from one page to another.

It is said that the GET method is faste

Answer 1

Just my few cents from 2016.

I am creating a simple message system. At first I used POST to receive new alerts. In jQuery I had:

$.post('/a/alerts', 'stamp=' + STAMP, function(result)
{
});

And in PHP I used $_POST['stamp']. Even from localhost I got 90-100 ms for every request like this. I simply changed:

$.get('/a/alerts?stamp=' + STAMP, function(result)
{
});

and in PHP switched to $_GET['stamp']. So a little less than 1 minute of changes. Now every request takes 30-40 ms.

So GET can be twice as fast as POST. Of course not always but for small amounts of data I get same results all the time.

Answer 2

GET is slightly faster because the values are sent in the header unlike the POST the values are sent in the request body, in the format that the content type specifies.

Usually the content type is application/x-www-form-urlencoded, so the request body uses the same format as the query string:

parameter=value&also=another When you use a file upload in the form, you use the multipart/form-data encoding instead, which has a different format. It's more complicated.