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Javascript Fetch is Slow (60ms vs 3ms)

Running Javascript fetch takes about 60ms per call on my machine. Compared to Python requests at 3ms, this is much slower.

Questions

  • Why is fetch so much slower?
  • Is there any way to speed it up? I am OK with answers that require me to reconfigure my browser.

Experiment

These are the details of my experiment.

System

  • Browser: Firefox 74.0 (64-bit)
  • Operating System: Ubuntu 18.04.4 LTS
  • Server: Django 3.0.3 (but since requests is much faster, this should not matter). Server and client are on the same machine.
  • For requests: Python 3.7.6 with requests 2.23.0
  • Processor: Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-6600K CPU @ 3.50GHz

Javascript Fetch

HTML that runs the Javascript below:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
  <head>
    <script src="script.js"></script>
  </head>
  <body>
  </body>
</html>

Javascript that makes multiple fetch requests and reports the average time per request.

// record all times
const times = [];

function call() {
    // record starting time
    const startFetch = performance.now();
    fetch("http://127.0.0.1:8000/timer/time")
        .then((response) => {
            // compute fetch duration
            const elapsedFetch = performance.now() - startFetch;

            // record result
            console.log(elapsedFetch);
            times.push(elapsedFetch);

            if (times.length<100) {
                // start next call
                call();
            } else {
                // report statistics
                const totalFetch = times.reduce((a, b) => a + b, 0);
                const averageFetch = totalFetch/times.length;
                const standardDeviation = Math.sqrt(times.reduce((a, b) => a + (b-averageFetch) ** 2, 0)/times.length);
                const totalElapsed = performance.now() - startTime;
                console.log("Average fetch time:", averageFetch, '+-', standardDeviation);
                console.log("Percentage of overall elapsed:", totalFetch/totalElapsed)
            }
        });
}

var startTime = performance.now();
call();

Firefox console output when visiting the HTML page:

Average fetch time: 62.51 +- 31.450117646838777
Percentage of overall elapsed: 0.9993605115907274

Similar result for Google Chrome Version 80.0.3987.149 (Official Build) (64-bit)

Average fetch time: 49.93 +- 4.92596183501253
Percentage of overall elapsed: 0.9993995196156925

Using XMLHttpRequest instead of fetch:

xhr.open("GET", "http://127.0.0.1:8000/timer/time");
xhr.send();
xhr.onload = ...

yields similar results:

Average fetch time: 60.19 +- 26.325157169521326
Percentage of overall elapsed: 0.9993358791300017

Python requests

Code analogous to Javascript, but in Python:

import requests
import time
import numpy as np

times = []
start_time = time.time()

for i in range(100):
    start_get = time.time()
    response = requests.get('http://127.0.0.1:8000/timer/time')
    elapsed_get = time.time() - start_get
    times += [elapsed_get]

total_elapsed = time.time() - start_time

total_get = np.sum(times)
average_get = np.average(times)
standard_deviation = np.std(times)

print("Average get time:", average_get, '+-', standard_deviation)
print("Percentage of overall elapsed:", total_get/total_elapsed)

Output:

Average get time: 0.0025661182403564453 +- 0.0001961814487345112
Percentage of overall elapsed: 0.9994576986364464

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Answer

While I still don’t really know why Javascript fetch is so slow, I have been able to switch to a faster option:

I now use WebSockets (on the client) and Django Channels (on the server), which are significantly faster.

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