Tell HN: t.co is adding a five-second delay to some domains

>>xslowz+(OP)
Additional details I wrangled for this rabbit hole. I don't think it's t.co doing this intentionally, but rather poor handling of 'do you have our cookies or not'. Everyone in this thread _proving things_ without taking into account the complexity of the modern web.

   man curl
       -b, --cookie <data|filename>
              (HTTP) Pass the data to the HTTP server in the Cookie header. It is supposedly the data previously received from the server in a "Set-Cookie:" line.

----

Add that option to your curl tests.

    ---
    $ time curl -s -b -A "curl/8.2.1" -e ";auto" -L https://t.co/4fs609qwWt -o /dev/null | sha256sum 
    eb9996199e81c3b966fa3d2e98e126516dfdd31f214410317f5bdcc3b241b6a2  -

    real    0m1.245s
    user    0m0.087s
    sys     0m0.034s
    ---

    $ time curl -s -b -e ";auto" -L https://t.co/4fs609qwWt -o /dev/null | sha256sum 
    eb9996199e81c3b966fa3d2e98e126516dfdd31f214410317f5bdcc3b241b6a2  -

    real    0m1.265s
    user    0m0.103s
    sys     0m0.023s
    ---

    $ time curl -s -b -A "Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:102.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/102.0" -e ";auto" -L https://t.co/4fs609qwWt -o /dev/null | sha256sum 
    eb9996199e81c3b966fa3d2e98e126516dfdd31f214410317f5bdcc3b241b6a2  -

    real    0m1.254s
    user    0m0.100s
    sys     0m0.018
    ---

>>Pengui+kK1
oh boy... -b takes an option which in your examples is -A and -e, then what follows is interpreted as a URL and you throw away the warnings:

  % curl -vgsSIw'> %{time_total}\n' -b -A "curl/8.2.1" https://t.co/DzIiCFp7Ti 2>&1 | grep '^\(* WARNING: \)\|\(Could not resolve host: \)\|>' 
  * WARNING: failed to open cookie file "-A"
  * Could not resolve host: curl
  curl: (6) Could not resolve host: curl
  * WARNING: failed to open cookie file "-A"
  > HEAD /DzIiCFp7Ti HTTP/2
  > Host: t.co
  > User-Agent: curl/8.1.2
  > Accept: */*
  > 
  > 0.013309
  > 0.112494

>>mzs+Gm2
Alright thanks for explaining that . Here's what I see explicitly setting the cookiejar

    $ time curl -s -b cookies.txt -c cookies.txt -A "Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:102.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/102.0" -e ";auto" -L https://t.co/DzIiCFp7Ti

    [t.co meta refresh page src]

    real     0m4.635s
    user   0m0.004s
    sys     0m0.008s

    $ time curl -b cookies.txt -c cookies.txt -A "wget/1.23" -e ";auto" -L https://t.co/DzIiCFp7Ti                        curl: (7)
    Failed to connect to www.threads.net port 443:  Connection refused
    real     0m4.635s
    user   0m0.011s
    sys     0m0.005s

    $ time curl -b cookies.txt -c cookies.txt -e ";auto" -L https://t.co/DzIiCFp7Ti                                       curl: (7)
    Failed to connect to www.threads.net port 443 Connection refused
    real     0m0.129s
    user   0m0.000s
    sys     0m0.013s

The failed to connects are threads.net likely blocking those user agents but the timing is there which is different than the first UA attempt.

zlacker