How to measure server response time for Python requests POST-request?

Question

I create requests POST-requests like this, where I specify timeout threshold:

response = requests.post(url, data=post_fields, timeout=timeout)

Answer 1

The Response object as returned by requests.post() has a property called elapsed, which give the time delta between the Request was sent and the Response was received. To get the delta in seconds, use the total_seconds() method:

response = requests.post(url, data=post_fields, timeout=timeout)
print(response.elapsed.total_seconds())

It should be mentioned that requests.post() is a synchronous operation, which means that it "blocks" until the response is received.

Answer 2

It depends on whether you can hit the server with a lot of test requests, or whether you need to wait for real requests to occur.

If you need real request data, then you'd need to wrap the call to determine the time of each request:

start = time.clock()
response = requests.post(url, data=post_fields, timeout=timeout)
request_time = time.clock() - start
self.logger.info("Request completed in {0:.0f}ms".format(request_time)
#store request_time in persistent data store

You'd need somewhere to store the results of each request over a period of time (file, database, etc). Then you can just calculate the stats of the response times.

If you have a test server available, you could benchmark the response without python using something like apachebench and sending test data for each request:

https://gist.github.com/kelvinn/6a1c51b8976acf25bd78