title: http HEAD vs GET performance
body: <p>I am setting-up a REST web service that just need to answer YES or NO, as fast as possible.</p>
  
  <p>Designing a HEAD service seems the best way to do it but I would like to know if I will really gain some time versus doing a GET request. </p>
  
  <p>I suppose I gain the body stream not to be open/closed on my server (about 1 millisecond?).
  Since the amount of bytes to return is very low, do I gain any time in transport, in IP packet number? </p>
  
  <p>Thanks in advance for your response!</p>
  
  <p><strong>Edit:</strong></p>
  
  <p>To explain further the context: </p>
  
  <ul>
  <li>I have a set of REST services executing some processes, if they are in an active state.</li>
  <li>I have another REST service indicating the state of all these first services.</li>
  </ul>
  
  <p>Since that last service will be called very often by a very large set of clients (one call expected every 5ms), I was wondering if using a HEAD method can be a valuable optimization? About 250 chars are returned in the response body. HEAD method at least gain the transport of these 250 chars, but what is that impact?</p>
  
  <p>I tried to benchmark the difference between the two methods (HEAD vs GET), running 1000 times the calls, but see no gain at all (&lt; 1ms)...</p>