Question

I am running a Rails 3.2.2 app on Ruby 1.9.3 and on my production server i run a Phusion Passenger/Apache Server.

I deliver a relatively huge amount of data objects in JSON format which contain redundant data from a related model and I want to know how many bytes the server has to deliver and how the redundant content can be gziped by the server and how the redundant data influences the size of the http response that has to be shipped.

Thanks for your help!

Answer 1

If you just want to know in general how much data is being sent, use curl or wget to make the request and save to a file — the size of the file is (approximately) the size of the response, not including the headers, which are typically small. gzip the file to see how much is actually sent over the wire.

Even cooler, use the developer tools of your favorite browser (which is Chrome, right?). Select Network tab, then click the GET (or PUT or POST) request that is executed and check things out. One tab will contain the headers of the response, one of which will likely contain a Content-Length header, assuming your server is set up to gzip, you’ll be able to see how much compression you’re getting (compare uncompressed to the Content-Length). The timings are all there, so you can see how much time it takes to get a connection, for the server to do the work, for the server to send back the data, etc. Brilliantly cool tools for understanding what’s really happening under the covers.

But echoing the comment of Alex (capital A) — if you’re sending a ton of data in an AJAX request, you should be thinking of architecture and design in most cases. Not all, but most.