Why curl > /dev/null and curl -o /dev/null has a large performance difference?

bash pipe curl

5,416

I can't reproduce this.

For that particular file, I did get slower speeds on some of the attempts, but that had nothing to do with the arguments to curl, it happened randomly and with both variants.

The version of curl I have (curl 7.52.1 (x86_64-pc-linux-gnu), from Debian), also doesn't handle /dev/null any differently from other output files, strace shows an open() and write()s to it:

$ strace -etrace=open,write curl -s http://www.google.com/ -o /dev/null
[...]
open("/dev/null", O_WRONLY|O_CREAT|O_TRUNC, 0666) = 4
write(4, "<!doctype html><html itemscope=\""..., 4096) = 4096
write(4, "px 0 4px;margin-left:4px}input{f"..., 4096) = 4096
...
+++ exited with 0 +++

Here's an output for my last two runs, no significant difference between the > /dev/null and -o /dev/null:

$ curl http://dl.google.com/dl/android/aosp/sailfish-pq2a.190205.003-factory-164a7269.zip > /dev/null
  % Total    % Received % Xferd  Average Speed   Time    Time     Time  Current
                                 Dload  Upload   Total   Spent    Left  Speed
100 1344M  100 1344M    0     0  94.5M      0  0:00:14  0:00:14 --:--:-- 91.0M

$ curl http://dl.google.com/dl/android/aosp/sailfish-pq2a.190205.003-factory-164a7269.zip -o /dev/null
  % Total    % Received % Xferd  Average Speed   Time    Time     Time  Current
                                 Dload  Upload   Total   Spent    Left  Speed
100 1344M  100 1344M    0     0  89.3M      0  0:00:15  0:00:15 --:--:-- 92.8M

5,416

Author by

Steven Yang

Updated on September 18, 2022

Comments

Steven Yang over 1 year

I am using Intel Atom D525, an extremely unpowerful processor for my family router with Debian 9. I tried both curl http://dl.google.com/dl/android/aosp/sailfish-pq2a.190205.003-factory-164a7269.zip > dev/null and curl http://dl.google.com/dl/android/aosp/sailfish-pq2a.190205.003-factory-164a7269.zip -o dev/null on that. The previous one can only get a speed of 25 MB/s and the next one can get a speed of 38 MB/s, mostly full of my 300Mbps bandwidth. Why these two command have such a gap of performance?
- ilkkachu over 5 years
  
  I do wonder a bit about the use-case here. Are you just measuring your network connection speed? Otherwise one would assume that it would be more interesting to look at how quickly you can download and process/store the file, than just download and throw away.
- Steven Yang over 5 years
  
  @ilkkachu If I use wget, the speed is about 8 MB/s. With curl >, the speed is about 11 MB/s. With curl -o, the speed is about 14 MB/s.
Steven Yang over 5 years

There are also no differences for the two commands on my PC with Intel i7. But on devices with much slower CPU I can always reproduce this.