too long

Question

Im working on a project that downloads up to 5000 individual pieces of data from a server. It basically is a PHP page that takes POST variable, gets the data from the DB and sends it back to the .NET client.

It is slow. It takes about 1 second per request. I've googled a lot and tried all sorts of tweaks to the code, like the famous proxy-setting etc. But nothing speeds it up.

Any idea's? All solutions that make this super fast are welcome. Even C-written DLL's or anything you can think of. This just needs to be a lot faster.

Public Function askServer(oCode As String) As String

    oBytesToSend = Encoding.ASCII.GetBytes("cmd=" & System.Web.HttpUtility.UrlEncode(oCode))

    Try
        oRequest = WebRequest.Create(webServiceUrl)
        oRequest.Timeout = 60000
        oRequest.Proxy = WebRequest.DefaultWebProxy
        CType(oRequest, HttpWebRequest).UserAgent = "XXXXX"
        oRequest.Method = "POST"
        oRequest.ContentLength = oBytesToSend.Length
        oRequest.ContentType = "application/x-www-form-urlencoded"

        oStream = oRequest.GetRequestStream()
        oStream.Write(oBytesToSend, 0, oBytesToSend.Length)

        oResponse = oRequest.GetResponse()
        If CType(oResponse, HttpWebResponse).StatusCode = Net.HttpStatusCode.OK Then
            oStream = oResponse.GetResponseStream()
            oReader = New StreamReader(oStream)
            oResponseFromServer = oReader.ReadToEnd()
            oResponseFromServer = System.Web.HttpUtility.UrlDecode(oResponseFromServer)
            Return oResponseFromServer
        Else
            MsgBox("Server error", CType(vbOKOnly + vbCritical, MsgBoxStyle), "")
            Return ""
        End If

    Catch e As Exception

        MsgBox("Oops" & vbCrLf & e.Message, CType(vbOKOnly + vbCritical, MsgBoxStyle), "")
        Return ""

    End Try

End Function

Answer 1

Some ideas :

• Run the http requests in parallel. (Client)
• If the data response size allows it get all data needed in one request (you need change your server implementation).
• Caching data. (Server)