Latency

Why is there variability across API requests?

API latency is affected by a few factors, mainly the following:

Type of Endpoint: Different endpoints utilize different underlying architectures. The providers endpoint uses a search infrastructure to find relevant providers across different parameters, while the reference endpoints are a direct lookup.

Query Parameters: Using a higher number of query parameters or computationally heavy ones. Right now, specialties and insurances filtering have the highest impact on API latency.

Fields: The number of fields included in the API response (controlled by the fields parameter)

Recommendations

Depending on whether your use case allows for it, we would recommend the following optimizations to Ribbon's API in order to decrease latency.

• Using fields or _excl_fields parameters to filter down the API response
• Lowering the page_size (we generally recommend the default of 25)
• When editing, applying the async=true, which will apply edits asynchronously