Soap UI vs Curl Response tIme Difference

Question

I have hosted a soap service built using spring in one of our data centers. When I test via SOAP UI , I get the response in 1 second or less. However when I run the same request via CURL , it takes more than 30 seconds to execute. I am running both the commands from same machine. What could be causing this difference?

curl  -H "Content-Type: text/xml; charset=utf-8" -H "SOAPAction:"  -d @request.xml <endpoint>

Maybe you should use `Content-Type: application/soap+xml; charset=UTF-8`. But definitely you should define your `SOAPAction` header, because right now it's invalid -- `curl` doesn't send it at all. — randomir, Nov 20 '17 at 18:33
Thanks @randomir. when I use application/xml , i see this error : {"timestamp":1511205140609,"validationMessages":[]}curl: (18) transfer closed with 273352 bytes remaining to read — Punter Vicky, Nov 20 '17 at 19:13
When I use --data-binary instead of -d , it seems to return fast — Punter Vicky, Nov 20 '17 at 19:15
Thank you! looks like -d strips new line etc whereas --data-binary sends the request as is. I saw it in another stackoverflow post. Please can you post your answer and I will accept and add bounty :) Thanks again for your help. — Punter Vicky, Nov 20 '17 at 19:23

score 4 · Accepted Answer · answered Nov 20 '17 at 19:50

A few things to consider:

the media type (Content-Type header field) for SOAP requests should be application/soap+xml (see SOAP 1.2 specs, end of section 1.3). If your encoding is UTF-8, then set Content-Type: application/soap+xml; charset=UTF-8.
your SOAPAction header field is left undefined, meaning curl is not sending that field at all. You can check this if you run curl with --trace-ascii /dev/stdout option.
to send your XML (binary) payload as-is, you can use --data-binary option, instead of -d/--data. It will preserve newlines and carriage returns. For XML content that shouldn't make any difference, but that probably depends on strictness of parser and schema used.
when debugging curl requests, it's useful to bounce the request off of echo sites like httpbin, as well as enable full verbosity with -vvv, maybe even use --trace* to inspect the exact payload sent/received.

Applying those fixes, your curl command will look like:

curl -H 'Content-Type: application/soap+xml; charset=UTF-8' \
     -H 'SOAPAction: Some-Action' \
     --data-binary @request.xml \
     <endpoint>

looks like I can only award bounty after 23 hrs. will do it tomorrow. — Punter Vicky, Nov 20 '17 at 19:52

Soap UI vs Curl Response tIme Difference

1 Answers1