.NET HttpWebRequest Speed versus Browser

Question

I have a question regarding the performance of the .Net HttpWebRequest client (or WebClient, gives similar results).

If I use HttpWebRequest to request an html page

Answer 1

What's the breakdown of that 1.7s? I suspect you are measuring the entire process?

Using this piece of code I get about 200ms in average:

var request = (HttpWebRequest)WebRequest.Create("http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/");

var stopwatch = new Stopwatch();
stopwatch.Start();

using (var response = (HttpWebResponse)request.GetResponse())
{
    stopwatch.Stop();
    Console.WriteLine("Elapsed: {0}ms", stopwatch.ElapsedMilliseconds);

    var responseStream = response.GetResponseStream();
    if (responseStream != null)
        using (var sr = new StreamReader(responseStream))
            Console.WriteLine("Title: {0}", Regex.Match(sr.ReadToEnd(), @"title>(.*)

Edit changed the code just to measure the actual HTTP request and tried again using Fiddler as well:

Program above: Elapsed: 78ms

Fiddler: Overall Elapsed: 00:00:00.0620000