When I call http-request with :close nil argument it takes 6 seconds more:
CL-USER> (time (drakma:http-request "http://192.168.1.2/")) Evaluation took: 0.013 seconds of real time 0.008001 seconds of total run time (0.008001 user, 0.000000 system) 61.54% CPU 17,442,126 processor cycles 233,168 bytes consed "..." 200 ((:CONNECTION . "close") (:CONTENT-LENGTH . "917") (:CONTENT-TYPE . "text/html; charset=utf-8") (:DATE . "Mon, 25 Aug 2008 12:46:20 GMT") (:SERVER . "Hunchentoot 0.15.7")) #<PURI:URI http://192.168.1.2%3E #<FLEXI-STREAMS:FLEXI-IO-STREAM {1005E78681}> T "OK"
CL-USER> (time (drakma:http-request "http://192.168.1.2/" :close nil)) Evaluation took: 6.428 seconds of real time 0.488030 seconds of total run time (0.400025 user, 0.088005 system) [ Run times consist of 0.240 seconds GC time, and 0.249 seconds non-GC time. ] 7.59% CPU 212 lambdas converted 994,309,191 processor cycles 18,388,176 bytes consed "..." 200 ((:CONTENT-LENGTH . "917") (:CONTENT-TYPE . "text/html; charset=utf-8") (:DATE . "Mon, 25 Aug 2008 12:46:04 GMT") (:SERVER . "Hunchentoot 0.15.7")) #<PURI:URI http://192.168.1.2%3E #<FLEXI-STREAMS:FLEXI-IO-STREAM {100799E001}> NIL "OK"
Drakma and all dependancies are latest, tested with SBCL and CCL, and different web servers.