cURL is an excellent utility to check processing / download times of your web application. It just downloads the content from http url but gives useful insights as well. There are Linux and Windows versions of the tool.

Now, handling special characters is tricky as the command will fail. For example, below command fails as ‘[‘ character is not recognized by the tool.

curl "<a href="http://durahc109d1-stg.corp.netapp.com:8983/solr/R2B3_SYSTEM.SYSTEM/select/?q=(customer_id:%5b">http://abc.my.com:8983/solr/KeySpace.Table/select/?q=(customer_id:</a>12345 AND update_date:[2013-12-01 TO 2013-12-10])&rows=100" > out.txt

A good way to handle it is split the URL into 2 parts: first comprising of the server name and application context.  Second part with all parameters.

curl -d rows=100 --data-encodeurl <a href="http://durahc109d1-stg.corp.netapp.com:8983/solr/R2B3_SYSTEM.SYSTEM/select/?q=(customer_id:%5b">q='(customer_id:</a>12345 AND update_date:[2013-12-01 TO 2013-12-10])' <a href="http://durahc109d1-stg.corp.netapp.com:8983/solr/R2B3_SYSTEM.SYSTEM/select/?q=(customer_id:%5b">http://abc.my.com:8983/solr/KeySpace.Table/select/</a> > out.txt