Volley: http requests slow

Question

If I make two HTTP requests to the same URL, one with only HttpClient and the other with Volley, the Volley requests takes much longer.

For example, in my test environment:

• using HttpClient directly to request google.com averages about 250ms
• using Volley to request google.com averages about 750ms

here's a log dump of a sample Volley request:

11:44:14.766: D/Volley(863): [1] MarkerLog.finish: (773  ms) [ ] http://google.com 0xa46e044c NORMAL 1
11:44:14.766: D/Volley(863): [1] MarkerLog.finish: (+0   ) [ 1] add-to-queue
11:44:14.786: D/Volley(863): [1] MarkerLog.finish: (+0   ) [93] cache-queue-take
11:44:14.786: D/Volley(863): [1] MarkerLog.finish: (+7   ) [93] cache-hit-expired
11:44:14.796: D/Volley(863): [1] MarkerLog.finish: (+1   ) [97] network-queue-take
11:44:14.806: D/Volley(863): [1] MarkerLog.finish: (+722 ) [97] network-http-complete
11:44:14.806: D/Volley(863): [1] MarkerLog.finish: (+20  ) [97] network-parse-complete
11:44:14.816: D/Volley(863): [1] MarkerLog.finish: (+16  ) [97] network-cache-written
11:44:14.826: D/Volley(863): [1] MarkerLog.finish: (+0   ) [97] post-response
11:44:14.836: D/Volley(863): [1] MarkerLog.finish: (+7   ) [ 1] done

as you can see, the bottleneck is in the actual HTTP request. Why is it so much slower?

Confirmation

Answer 1

Looks like Volley is caching your response. Using HttpClient directly does not cache anything.

Squeteague

Surely caching should make Volley faster not slower. – Alicaalicante

It's slower only for the first time. Next retries it will use response from cache rather than initiating another http transaction. – Squeteague

In the Volley log, it shows that the cache response is not being reused (cache-hit-expired) and it only takes about 7ms to check this. But the actual http request takes 722ms. Writing the cache takes 16ms. So I don't think caching is the problem. – Alicaalicante

Answer 2

Volley usually caches the network responses which make it slower. If you still want to use volley you can clear the cache to make it faster eventually.

AppController.getInstance().getRequestQueue().getCache().remove(key);

You can create a handler event to run this automatically every 2 minutes or so. Hope that helps:))

Oporto