Popular:
 Building Resilient Systems on AWS: Learn how to design and implement a resilient, highly available, fault-tolerant infrastructure on AWS.

How to Simulate Long HTTP Requests

By  on  

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!

Request Metrics real user monitoring
Request Metrics real user monitoring
Request Metrics real user monitoring
Request Metrics real user monitoring

Recent Features

Incredible Demos

  • By
    Introducing MooTools LinkAlert

    One of my favorite Firefox plugins is called LinkAlert. LinkAlert shows the user an icon when they hover over a special link, like a link to a Microsoft Word DOC or a PDF file. I love that warning because I hate the surprise...

  • By
    Introducing LazyLoad 2.0

    While improvements in browsers means more cool APIs for us to play with, it also means we need to maintain existing code.  With Firefox 4's release came news that my MooTools LazyLoad plugin was not intercepting image loading -- the images were loading regardless of...

Discussion

  1. Trevor

    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.

  2. Charlie

    Thanks David always love your content.
    Although in this particular case i fail to understand a practical use, could you share an example?

    thanks !

  3. Dima

    And here is concise way to do it in NodeJs, the server will wait for 3 seconds before response: 

    const http = require('http')

const server = http.createServer((req, res) => {
  setTimeout(() => {
    res.writeHead(200)
    res.end('Hello, World!')
  }, 3000)
})
server.listen(8080)

Wrap your code in <pre class="{language}"></pre> tags, link to a GitHub gist, JSFiddle fiddle, or CodePen pen to embed!