Sparky wrote: > Hey! I am developing a small application that tests multiple websites > and compares their "response time". Some of these sites do not respond > to a ping and, for the measurement to be standardized, all sites must > have the same action preformed upon them. Another problem is that not > all of the sites have the same page size and I am not interested in > how long it takes to load a page but instead just how long it takes > for the website to respond. Finally, I am looking to keep this script > platform independent, if at all possible.
Yes, lots of people block ICMP so you can't use it to reliably tell whether a machine is there or not. At least three possible solutions. 1) Perform a HEAD request against the document root. This is likely to be a static page and making it a HEAD request will make most responses take similar times. 2) Perform an OPTIONS request as specified in the RFC below for the * resource. This doesn't always work. 3) Perform a request you believe will fail so that you are provided with a 4XX error code, the only time this should take any appreciable time is when someone has cute server-generated error pages. HTTP/1.1 RFC - http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2616.txt n -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list