Question

In groovy, is there a way to send a request to a URL, ignoring the response? The main aim is to send more requests to the server, in a shorter period of time.

As the result is unimportant to me, once the request is sent, I don’t want the script to wait for a response before continuing.

Here’s my current script:

(1..50).each { element->
  def url = "http://someUrl"
  url.toURL().text 
} 

In this code, the text method has to load the entire response, which I don’t really care about. The important part is that the request is sent, and waiting for a response is unimportant.

Is there a similar send method? (along the lines of..

url.toURL().send

Alternatively, is there a “groovy” way I can speed this up using GPARS to run the loop in parallel?

Answer 1

For just sending the URL, you could just use the withInputStream or withReader methods to send the request without reading the text. This will just create a handler to read the incoming text that would immediately close.

As for GPars, you can just use a combination of withPool and callAysnc to create a thread pool to execute the requests concurrently. For example:

@Grab(group='org.codehaus.gpars', module='gpars', version='0.12')
import static groovyx.gpars.GParsExecutorsPool.withPool

withPool(50) {
    50.times {
        Closure callUrl = {"http://google.com".toURL().withReader {}}
        callUrl.callAsync();
    }
}

However, if you’re not concerned with the number of threads, you could just create your own threads without GPars. For example:

50.times { 
    Closure callUrl = {"http://google.com".toURL().withReader {}}
    Thread.start callUrl
}