ntimes

Execute a command N times

Often times, I want to obtain an average/median of request timing stats for a particular endpoint. This binary makes it possible for you to obtain reasonable stats by executing your command ntimes.

Reasonable: You might be optimizing a specific endpoint, trimming unnecesary data. ntimes can help you measure and obtain reasonable confidence. Not so much: Hitting an endpiont that returns HTML. While this may be insightful, first input delays is likely more of a concern. Once your application/browser receives its first bytes, there is still a long way to go before the user can start interacting with your site.

Links

https://blog.cloudflare.com/a-question-of-timing/

Usage

To send a sync process and wait for each subsequent command to finish.

$ ntimes 100 -- curl 'https://google.com' -s -o /dev/null -w "%{time_starttransfer}\n"

Sends command to child process. This starts subshells in parallel.

$ ntimes 100 -p -- curl 'https://google.com' -s -o /dev/null -w "%{time_starttransfer}\n"

Lastly, to gather your metrics, you can redirect the stdout to the stdin of another command.

$ ntimes 100 -- curl 'https://google.com' -s -o /dev/null -w "%{time_starttransfer}\n" | percentile

percentile

License

The MIT License