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STARTTRANSFER_TIME vs PRETRANSFER_TIME

From: Christopher Masone <cmasone_at_google.com>
Date: Sat, 4 Oct 2008 00:34:02 -0700

Hi, all. I've inherited an application that uses libcurl for its
http(s) transfer needs.

I've noticed some speed issues (libcurl v 7.18.2 on Windows), and so I
started looking into just how long different operations were taking.
When I looked into uploading large files, I noticed that curl would
report that (after the initial connection of a handle to the server),
namelookup, connect, and pretransfer time are all 0. Starttransfer
time, is almost always 2 seconds, and then total time is between 3 and
4 seconds, to POST a megabyte of data.

The docs describing the difference between pretransfer and
starttransfer say that the latter "This includes
CURLINFO_PRETRANSFER_TIME and also the time the server needs to
calculate the result."

What does that mean? The server to calculate which result? The first
byte of data has yet to be uploaded...no?

Any help is much appreciated!
Received on 2008-10-04