Question

What is your “average” Magento Core API response time?

I’m getting ~1.5seconds just to make a SOAP call and return a number (I already have a soap object and session id). Not sure if terrible server or magento.

Any tips on improving Magento API response time? Thanks.

Answer 1

I don’t think knowing the “average” response times other users have with their individual Magento SOAP API calls will be of much help here.

As long as these other users are not requesting the very same server, from at least the same subnet your client is in, this would result in comparing apples and oranges.

I can confirm, that server-side execution time of some Magento SOAP API methods can be quite time consuming. Especially, if the SOAP API method being used causes many database writes of data which is modelled the EAV way and having huge databases.

But as you seem to be talking about a method just reading a value via SOAP (you didn’t mention which API method you use exactly), I doubt it’s the API methods code being slow.

I’d strongly recommend, to first identify the location of your requests actual bottleneck to be

• client-side
• transmission
• server-side

before even starting trying to optimize API methods.

The bottleneck can be the result of a wrong cache/system configuration, on one or even both sides (client/server).

Or having a client/server which permanently runs under heavy load.

Or having long round trip times (RTT) for whatever reasons (just imagine having a ping of 700ms).

Or it could be the DNS lookups on client-side slowing things down.

Or it could even be the browser just slowly rendering the output of the request, because the output uses a complex layout and download hundreds of other files (hehe, had that once, hated it^^).

I’d probably first have a quick ping to the server (in parallel to your request) to see the RTT and to know whether I can exclude transmission as the bottleneck.

If you’re on Firefox, you could also directly have a look at Firebugs Net panel instead. Check the requests timeline to see whether the bottleneck is client-side, dns/transmission or server-side.