http HEAD vs GET performance

Question

I am setting-up a REST web service that just need to answer YES or NO, as fast as possible.

Designing a HEAD service seems the best way to do it but I would like to know if I will really gain some time versus doing a GET request.

I suppose I gain the body stream not to be open/closed on my server (about 1 millisecond?). Since the amount of bytes to return is very low, do I gain any time in transport, in IP packet number?

Thanks in advance for your response!

Edit:

To explain further the context:

• I have a set of REST services executing some processes, if they are in an active state.
• I have another REST service indicating the state of all these first services.

Since that last service will be called very often by a very large set of clients (one call expected every 5ms), I was wondering if using a HEAD method can be a valuable optimization? About 250 chars are returned in the response body. HEAD method at least gain the transport of these 250 chars, but what is that impact?

I tried to benchmark the difference between the two methods (HEAD vs GET), running 1000 times the calls, but see no gain at all (< 1ms)...

Answer 1

GET fetches head + body, HEAD fetches head only. It should not be a matter of opinion which one is faster. I don't undestand the upvoted answers above. If you are looking for META information than go for HEAD, which is meant for this purpose.