Improving API Performance
How to improve your API's performance.
Pagination breaks significant responses up into 'pages.' It can also be used to organize and categorize results. APIs that return large amounts of data are slowed down, but pagination limits the number of results to help keep network traffic manageable.
Synchronous logging slows a system down by sending individual logs more frequently. In contrast, asynchronous logging gathers several logs before pushing them to the logging files. Although better for performance, asynchronous logging can cause some logs to be lost if an error occurs before the accumulation is pushed.
Database connection pooling is used to reduce the burden of constantly opening and closing database connections, which is slow and costly. Several connections are kept continuously open, and clients can connect and disconnect with them as they please. This improves performance and scalability.
Caching stores frequently used data in the browser. This means it can be quickly retrieved from the cache whenever needed. The alternative is to make another call to the server to retrieve it, so caching is a great way to reduce unnecessary calls to the server and improve performance.
There are various methods of payload compression, a popular way being GZIP. Compressed data has minimized download size and increased upload speed. Without it, large and heavier payloads reduce performance.