How can I get the response time of a HTTP request in elixir?

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I don’t know if that would work for you (I’ve seen it being used in knutin/elli), but if all of your work is done in a single process, you can put timings into the process dictionary:

defp t(key) do
  :erlang.put({:time, key}, :os.timestamp())
end

and call it in different places inside the same process

t(:start_request)
# request something
t(:done_requesting)
t(:start_parsing_body)
# parse body
t(:done_parsing_body)

and then collect the timings at some point later (you would need to be in the same process though).

Enum.flat_map(:erlang.get(), fn
  {{:time, event} = key, time} ->
    :erlang.erase(key)
    [{event, time}]
  
  _ ->
    []
end)

which would return something like

timings = [start_request: {1518, 275996, 334820}, done_requesting: {1518, 276000, 54915}]

and you can calculate diffs with :timer.now_diff/2

start_request = timings[:start_request]
done_requesting = timings[:done_requesting]

:timer.now_diff(done_requesting, start_request)
#=> 3720095 (microseconds)

You might want to read Two frequently used system calls are ~77% slower on AWS EC2 if you are on xen. I think beam uses these calls if it is compiled with --enable-gettimeofday-as-os-system-time and erl_xcomp_clock_gettime_cpu_time set to yes, but I might be wrong.

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