Down To The Wire: HTTP Sniffers
At Webapper, we’ve always described our tuning & troubleshooting consulting as a “wire-to-wire” service. This means that we find and fix performance and/or stability problems wherever they are, even if they’re in the network layer (e.g., the TCP “silly window” problem). And beyond troubleshooting production systems, we’ve always found that HTTP sniffers are useful during development, too. We just heard about a free tool from Microsoft, named Fiddler, so I thought I’d blog it here along with some others that we use regularly:
- Fiddler: It’s a free tool written by Eric Lawrence at Microsoft. It’s really technically an HTTP proxy, and thus is a specialized tool for sniffing Web requests.
- Wireshark (formerly Ethereal): This is one we’ve used for a long time. It’s a general purpose packet sniffer, and sees all packets, not just HTTP.
- ServiceCapture: Written by Kevin Langdon, we’ve got copies of this laying all over the virtual office. The killer feature in this tool is its decoding of service requests. It’ll decode AMF/remoting packets, for example, and show you their full data structure. Very, very useful.
Don’t forget Charles (http://www.xk72.com/charles/index.php) in that list. In addition, here’s a huge list from Port80 software:
http://www.port80software.com/200ok/archive/2005/06/15/606.aspx
Rey
Comment by Rey Bango — February 29, 2008 @ 12:00 am
Heya Rey. Thanks a mil for that long list!
Comment by Patrick — February 29, 2008 @ 12:00 am
My pleasure Patrick.
Comment by Rey Bango — February 29, 2008 @ 12:00 am
ServiceCapture is a *LIFE SAVER* if you’re a Flex or AJAX developer. A definite must have.
There’s also Charles Web Debugging Proxy which is pretty good too:
http://www.xk72.com/charles/
Comment by Tariq Ahmed — February 29, 2008 @ 12:00 am
Heya Patrick, this is of course a topic that many people always need to be made aware of. So, to add to the mention of a couple more alternatives, here are still more:
http://carehart.org/resourcelists/tools_to_consider/#proxy
This is one category in dozens that I offer, listing tools like this that CFers may be interested in.
/charlie
Comment by Charlie Arehart — February 29, 2008 @ 12:00 am
Heya Charlie. Thanks for stopping by, and thanks also for adding to the list!
Comment by Patrick — March 3, 2008 @ 12:00 am
I second the mention of the Charles Web Debugging Proxy that Tariq mentioned. It is fantastic. It supports AMF, XML, images, etc. Shows timing info. Simulates network latency & slow bandwidth. It does more than I can mention here.
http://www.xk72.com/charles/
Comment by Brian M — April 11, 2008 @ 12:00 am