Any way to speed up WWW requests?

Question

I'm moving a multiplayer application of mine from XNA over to Unity so that I can make use of the web player. To make things work with the Web Player, it seems I have to use the WWW class instead of HttpWebRequest. My tests are showing that accessing the exact same page from a Unity application takes 10 times longer using WWW than it does using HttpWebRequest. Is that to be expected? Is there anything I can do to improve WWW's performance?

In my specific case, the WWW request takes about 450 ms (around half a second) to fully execute, while the HttpWebRequest is taking 47 ms - less than half of a tenth of a second!

Answer 1

Answer by Max Kaufmann · Oct 28, 2010 at 02:23 AM

WWW is also encoding the download into proper objects - are you accounting for the post-download initialization in your comparison?

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mikeytrw · Sep 20, 2011 at 12:55 PM 0

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Is there any way to avoid the encoding/processing?

It appears WWW is pretty inefficient.

Answer 2

I've had some success increasing WWW request performance by building the POST data myself rather than using the WWWForm object:

     private string generatePostString(){
     
     //MW: Generate a random salt for this request
     System.Random random = new System.Random();
     int randomNumber = random.Next(0, 9999999);

     
     //MW: hash the salt and secret key
     string salt = randomNumber.ToString();
     string hashedKey = Md5Sum(mSecretKey + salt);
     
     System.Text.StringBuilder sb = new System.Text.StringBuilder();
     
     sb.AppendLine("hashedKey="+ hashedKey +"&salt="+ salt +"&deviceType=5&bindingVersion=0.1");
     
     foreach (DictionaryEntry item in mParameters){
         //MW: TODO We need to distinguish between data types and correctly handle each one.
         sb.AppendLine("&params["+item.Key.ToString()+"]="+item.Value.ToString());
     }
     
     return sb.ToString();
     
 }
 
 
 private byte[] convertPostStringToData(string postString){

     //MW: convert the string into a byte array
     ASCIIEncoding encoding = new ASCIIEncoding();
     return encoding.GetBytes(postString);
         
 }

Also, I suspect the additional time for a WWW request is because it has to load the crossdomain.xml for every request which is pretty annoying.

Any way to speed up WWW requests?

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