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Take Twitter for example, they say twitter.com as a client of their own API. Could this be one of the reason why Twitter is quite ‘slow’?
Reference: http://engineering.twitter.com/2010/09/tech-behind-new-twittercom.html
Would you recommend using your own API for you main website/app?
If using own API is OK, what are the ways to avoid performance issues?
Regarding using your own API: It’s about trade offs. In the twitter example by using their own API they were able to “allocate more resources to the API team.” That benefit for them outweighed a performance hit. There are other benefits not mentioned either, Like, being the first to vet your api and having a single unified entry point into the system. There are drawbacks as well that are mentioned in the link you posted.
For your application you should look at the architectural qualities you want to achieve and balance that with the constraints you are given and make your own choice. If ultra high performance is at the top of the list then craft your solution to meet that goal.
Regarding performance when using your own API: Again it depends. In the twitter case they knew they would be accessing the API in JavaScript. So the physical jumps are Browser –> Server –> DB. There is no way to get around these hops if you are doing client-server development. In the link you posted they talked about going directly to the DB. Yes that would be faster, but I’m not sure how to do that from a javascript client. I suppose if they had used websockets to a custom API then that would have been faster, but at what development cost.
Summary So it’s not that they are using their own API that was the performance hit, it was that they wanted the client to be an HTTP hop away.
Please note that none of these comments talk about what the server –> db calls look like or their caching strategy, or any of the other dozen things which could be a bottleneck