[TIP] Quickly benchmark commands using Perl

TIL that I can use Perl’s Benchmark module to time and compare the performance of different commands in an OS-agnostic way, ie as long as Perl is installed.

For example, to benchmark curl, wget and httpie you could simply run:

<span style="color:#323232;">$ perl -MBenchmark=:all 
</span><span style="color:#323232;">     -E </span><span style="color:#183691;">'$cmd_wget    = sub { system("wget  https://google.com > /dev/null 2>&amp;1") };'</span><span style="color:#323232;"> 
</span><span style="color:#323232;">     -E </span><span style="color:#183691;">'$cmd_curl    = sub { system("curl  https://google.com > /dev/null 2>&amp;1") };'</span><span style="color:#323232;"> 
</span><span style="color:#323232;">     -E </span><span style="color:#183691;">'$cmd_httpie  = sub { system("https https://google.com > /dev/null 2>&amp;1") };'</span><span style="color:#323232;"> 
</span><span style="color:#323232;">     -E </span><span style="color:#183691;">'$timeresult  = timethese(15, { "wget" => $cmd_wget, "curl" => $cmd_curl, "httpie" => $cmd_httpie });'</span><span style="color:#323232;"> 
</span><span style="color:#323232;">     -E </span><span style="color:#183691;">'cmpthese($timeresult)'
</span>

which on my old T530 produces:

<span style="color:#323232;">Benchmark: timing 15 iterations of curl, httpie, wget...
</span><span style="color:#323232;">
</span><span style="color:#323232;">      curl:  2 wallclock secs ( 0.00 usr  0.00 sys +  0.42 cusr  0.11 csys =  0.53 CPU) @ 28.30/s (n=15)
</span><span style="color:#323232;">    httpie:  8 wallclock secs ( 0.00 usr  0.01 sys +  4.63 cusr  0.79 csys =  5.43 CPU) @  2.76/s (n=15)
</span><span style="color:#323232;">      wget:  3 wallclock secs ( 0.00 usr  0.00 sys +  0.53 cusr  0.19 csys =  0.72 CPU) @ 20.83/s (n=15)
</span><span style="color:#323232;">    
</span><span style="color:#323232;">         Rate httpie   wget   curl
</span><span style="color:#323232;">httpie 2.76/s     --   -87%   -90%
</span><span style="color:#323232;">wget   20.8/s   654%     --   -26%
</span><span style="color:#323232;">curl   28.3/s   925%    36%     --
</span>

Very handy indeed ❤