Ok. I'm testing a new program component that is supposed to speed up our pipeline on the server. What it does is take in HEAD requests and shuffle them off to a different pipeline that is specially designed to handle HEAD requests quickly. The functionality works but now comes the question: how much does it speed things up? Or does it speed things up at all?

To originally test this I SSHed onto the server I wanted to test and telneted from there back to the box itself. This let me verify that the component handled the request correctly. I sent the telnet from the server itself to eliminate the http travel time as much as possible.

Now I need to time how long it takes for a request to work through the pipeline. I've been trying to

time telnet myserver

but entering in user information like the host and body information makes the time erratic

I.E.
HEAD /csmonitor/web/guest/world HTTP/1.1
host: preprod.dev.csmonitor.com


So I'm trying to find something I can script to give me a more accurate idea of the time.
The Expect program requires TLC which we don't really want to install so can anyone recommend a command line argument I can use to send Head requests? One I can script so I can use the time command?

Any help would be great. Thanks