How to quickly check if URL server is available

Question

I have a URL in the form

http://www.mywebsite.com/util/conv?a=1&from=%s&to=%s

And want to check if it is available.

The lin

Answer 1

As mentioned by 'eridal', that should be faster, open the socket; however, it only tells you that a server is listening on the host and port but to be sure, you need to write HTTP or alternately a bad request (junk), you should get HTTP/1.1 400 Bad Request. By reading the first line returned, if it contains HTTP, then you are sure that the server is a HTTP server. This way you are sure that the server is available as well as a HTTP server.

This is in extension to the above answer by eridal.

Answer 2

Below code waits until webpage is available:

public void waitForWebavailability() throws Exception {
        boolean success = false;
        long waitTime = 0;
        while (!success) {
            try {
                waitTest(30000);
                waitTime += 30000;
                if (waitTime > 600000) {

                    System.out.println("Web page is not available");
                }
                webDriver.get("http://www.google.com");
                if (webDriver.getTitle().toLowerCase().contains("sometitle")) {
                    success = true;
                }
            } catch (Exception e) {
                success = false;
            }

        }

    }

// Code related to waittest

public void waitTest(long millis) throws Exception {
        try {
            Thread.sleep(millis);
        } catch (InterruptedException e) {
            throw new Exception(e);
        }
    }