[TIP] Quickly benchmark commands using Perl

TIL that I can use Perl's Benchmark module to time and compare the performance of different commands in an OS-agnostic way, ie as long as Perl is installed.

For example, to benchmark curl, wget and httpie you could simply run:

$ perl -MBenchmark=:all \
     -E '$cmd_wget    = sub { system("wget  https://google.com > /dev/null 2>&1") };' \
     -E '$cmd_curl    = sub { system("curl  https://google.com > /dev/null 2>&1") };' \
     -E '$cmd_httpie  = sub { system("https https://google.com > /dev/null 2>&1") };' \
     -E '$timeresult  = timethese(15, { "wget" => $cmd_wget, "curl" => $cmd_curl, "httpie" => $cmd_httpie });' \
     -E 'cmpthese($timeresult)'

which on my old T530 produces:

Benchmark: timing 15 iterations of curl, httpie, wget...

      curl:  2 wallclock secs ( 0.00 usr  0.00 sys +  0.42 cusr  0.11 csys =  0.53 CPU) @ 28.30/s (n=15)
    httpie:  8 wallclock secs ( 0.00 usr  0.01 sys +  4.63 cusr  0.79 csys =  5.43 CPU) @  2.76/s (n=15)
      wget:  3 wallclock secs ( 0.00 usr  0.00 sys +  0.53 cusr  0.19 csys =  0.72 CPU) @ 20.83/s (n=15)
    
         Rate httpie   wget   curl
httpie 2.76/s     --   -87%   -90%
wget   20.8/s   654%     --   -26%
curl   28.3/s   925%    36%     --

Very handy indeed ❤