My previous post presented “A Graphical View of API Performance Based on Call Location.” In that post, we analyzed the performance of a week of calls to the World Bank Countries API (which is served from Washington DC) from four different locations around the globe: Washington DC, USA; Oregon, USA; Ireland; and Tokyo, Japan. The API performance across the week showed remarkable consistency. Calls to the API from Washington DC had by far the best performance; calls from Ireland generally outperformed calls from Oregon, which generally outperformed calls from Tokyo. Here’s the data for the week (the Y-axis is logarithmic):
The timings for calls to APIs are broken down into components by cURL, “a command line tool and library for transferring data with URLs.” In addition to providing total performance timing (shown in the above plot), the API Science Performance Report API also provides individual cURL component timings. The cURL component timings are: