How to Simulate Long HTTP Requests
It happens less frequently these days but there are times when we need to accommodate for a HTTP request timing out. The service could be down, under heavy traffic, or just poorly coded, or any host of other issues.
Whenever I need to simulate a long HTTP request, I use a bit of PHP to make it happen:
<?php
// Don't resolve this request for 5 seconds
sleep(5);
// A generic response
echo 'This is the response!';
// ... or hit a URL to make the case more realistic
echo file_get_contents('https://website.tld/endpoint');
?>
With that script created, I make PHP start a server so I can make the request locally:
php -S localhost:8000
Now I can hit http://localhost:8000
and get the long request I want!
There are a number of ways you can accomplish these long form requests but this has always been a favorite of mine!
![5 Ways that CSS and JavaScript Interact That You May Not Know About]()
CSS and JavaScript: the lines seemingly get blurred by each browser release. They have always done a very different job but in the end they are both front-end technologies so they need do need to work closely. We have our .js files and our .css, but...
![Send Text Messages with PHP]()
Kids these days, I tell ya. All they care about is the technology. The video games. The bottled water. Oh, and the texting, always the texting. Back in my day, all we had was...OK, I had all of these things too. But I still don't get...
![CSS :target]()
One interesting CSS pseudo selector is :target
. The target pseudo selector provides styling capabilities for an element whose ID matches the window location's hash. Let's have a quick look at how the CSS target pseudo selector works!
The HTML
Assume there are any number of HTML elements with...
![DWRequest: MooTools 1.2 AJAX Listener & Message Display]()
Though MooTools 1.2 is in its second beta stage, its basic syntax and theory changes have been hashed out. The JavaScript library continues to improve and become more flexible.
Fellow DZone Zone Leader Boyan Kostadinov wrote a very useful article detailing how you can add a...
That’s cool! Thanks for the tip.
I could see having it take a query param to set the sleep time arbitrarily for different scenarios you’re simulating.
Thanks David always love your content.
Although in this particular case i fail to understand a practical use, could you share an example?
thanks !