How can i ignore server response to save bandwidth?

I am using a server to send some piece of information to another server every second. T开发者_JAVA技巧he problem is that the other server response is few kilobytes and this consumes the bandwidth on the first server ( about 2 GB in an hour ). I would like to send the request and ignore the return ( not even receive it to save bandwidth ) ..

I use a small python script for this task using (urllib). I don't mind using any other tool or even any other language if this is going to make the request only.

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A 5K reply is small stuff and is probably below the standard TCP window size of your OS. This means that even if you close your network connection just after sending the request and checking just the very first bytes of the reply (to be sure that request has been really received) probably the server already sent you the whole answer and the packets are already on the wire or on your computer.

If you cannot control (i.e. trim down) what is the server reply for your notification the only alternative I can think to is to add another server on the remote machine waiting for a simple command and doing the real request locally and just sending back to you the result code. This can be done very easily may be even just with bash/perl/python using for example netcat/wget locally.

By the way there is something strange in your math as Glenn Maynard correctly wrote in a comment.

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For HTTP, you can send a HEAD request instead of GET or POST:

import urllib2

request = urllib2.Request('https://stackoverflow.com/q/5049244/')
request.get_method = lambda: 'HEAD' # override get_method
response = urllib2.urlopen(request) # make request
print response.code, response.url

Output

200 https://stackoverflow.com/questions/5049244/how-can-i-ignore-server-response-t
o-save-bandwidth

See How do you send a HEAD HTTP request in Python?

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Sorry but this does not make much sense and is likely a violation of the HTTP protocol. I consider such an idea as weird and broken-by-design. Either make the remote server shut up or configure your application or whatever is running on the remote server on a different protocol level using a smarter protocol with less bandwidth usage. Everything else is hard being considered as nonsense.