Measure website load time with Python requests

Question

I'm trying to build a tool for testing the delay of my internet connection, more specifically web site load times. I thought of using the python requests module for the loading part.

Problem is, it's got no built-in functionality to measure the time it took to get the full response. For this I thought I would use the timeit module.

What I'm not sure about is that if I run timeit like so:

t = timeit.Timer("requests.get('http://www.google.com')", "import requests")

I'm I really measuring the time it took the response to arrive or is it the time it takes for the request to be built, sent, received, etc? I'm guessing I could maybe disregard that excecution time since I'm testing networks with very long delays (~700ms)?

Is there a better way to do this programatically?

Answer 1

There is such functionality in latest version of requests:

http://docs.python-requests.org/en/latest/api/?highlight=elapsed#requests.Response.elapsed

For example:

requests.get("http://127.0.0.1").elapsed.total_seconds()

Answer 2

As for your question, it should be the total time for

1. time to create the request object
2. Send request
3. Receive response
4. Parse response (See comment from Thomas Orozco )

Other ways to measure a single request load time is to use urllib:

nf = urllib.urlopen(url)
start = time.time()
page = nf.read()
end = time.time()
nf.close()
# end - start gives you the page load time