title: Is there a faster way to check if an external web page exists?
body: <p>I wrote this method to check if a page exists or not:</p>
  
  <pre><code>protected bool PageExists(string url)
  {
  try
      {
          Uri u = new Uri(url);
          WebRequest w = WebRequest.Create(u);
  
              w.Method = WebRequestMethods.Http.Head;
  
          using (StreamReader s = new StreamReader(w.GetResponse().GetResponseStream()))
          {
              return (s.ReadToEnd().Length &gt;= 0);
          }
      }
          catch
      {
          return false;
          }
      }
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>I am using it to check a set of pages (iterates from AAAA-AAAZ), and it takes between 3 and 7 seconds to run the entire loop. Is there a faster or more efficient way to do this?</p>