Speeding up the Magento REST/SOAP API

Question

We have been using Magento's REST/SOAP apis on version 1.7.0.2 and it is far from being performant for us. We constantly experience timeouts even with WSDL cache turned on especially if large data sets are involved.

After attending a Magento meetup I realized that we are not the only ones who experience these performance issues when it comes to the Magento API.

Are there any related optimizations we can take to speed up the Magento API other than not using the API?

Answer 1

It is pity, but there is no drop-in solution to make Magento SOAP API faster.

API is slow not only on Magento side but also on the client side, as WSDL size is incredibly huge for loading into memory and creating all necessary objects to work with it. Depending on your API usage you might consider the following:

1. Avoid using API at all and switch to document based exchange (CSV files exchange for ERP communication)
2. Write custom API endpoints that expose only needed functionality via WSDL and/or use custom api models, that do only thing required for your business logic.

Answer 2

We just started to use the Magento REST API and performance for UPDATE/Insert of products are painfully slow, we are looking at hours(5-10) merely a couple of hundreds of updated items. I think we are on the Magento 1.7. We would not like to use other custom solution for the main reason that we don't know the Magento tables and framwork good enough (also we don't have access to the server), the risk of corrupting the system/data is too large. Is it possible to load a CSV file automatically? Or is there some kind of other scripting solution out there like php? Or can we speed up the REST API? The good thing with the REST API is that we don't need to involve consultancy intensive labour to integrate our ERP with Magento, also they are on different servers with different system suppliers. Thoughts are welcome!