Magento API calls duration

Question

I was having some issues yesterday with this, but I already managed to solve it using only API calls, as I was using both API and Magento Core.

This is my actual code:

        $proxy = new SoapClient($this->_api_url); // TODO : change url
        $sessionId = $proxy->login($this->_user, $this->_password); // TODO : change login and pwd if necessary
        $pageURL= $this->_page_url;
        $result = $proxy->catalogProductList($sessionId);

        $product_list = array();

        foreach($result as $p)
        {
            $starttime = microtime(true);

            $id = $p->product_id;
            $info = new stdclass();
            $info->attributes = array('sku', 'name', 'description', 'price', 'url_path');
            $product = $proxy->catalogProductInfo($sessionId, $id, NULL, $info);
            $image = $proxy->catalogProductAttributeMediaList($sessionId, $id, NULL, 'ID');

            $endtime = microtime(true);
            $timediff = $endtime - $starttime;

            echo "api calls $timediff <br><br>";

            $name = $product->name;
            $description = $product->description;
            $price = $product->price;
            $formatted_price = number_format($price, 2);    
            $image_url = $image[0]->url;
            $product_url = $product->url_path;
            $product_url = $pageURL.$product_url;
            $sku = $product->sku;

            $my_product = new Product();
            $my_product->id = $id;
            $my_product->name = $name;
            $my_product->description = $description;
            $my_product->price = $formatted_price;
            $my_product->image_url = $image_url;
            $my_product->product_url = $product_url;
            $my_product->sku = $sku;
            $product_list[] = $my_product;
        }

        return $product_list;

The problem with this approach is, each product needs 2 API calls, one for name, description, sku, etc, and another one for the image url. This takes too long, as for 3 products that I have, it takes like 5 seconds to load the page (two api calls for each one is like 1.5s). Is this the normal behavior of Magento API, or there is a problem with my system? Will I need to change all my method?

BTW, I'm testing this in localhost.

Answer 1

0,5s - 1,5s is a pretty standard response time from the SOAP API, also on localhost.

I created a small SOAP performance test-script some time ago which does nothing more than 10x10 login and endSession requests via SOAP API v1. No specific action was performed. 1 request took between 0,9 and 1,4 seconds with my local webserver.

SOAP is a well defined web-service which has pre-built standards (SOAPv1, SOAPv2, SOAPv2 WS-I) that uses XML for its requests and is heavyweight compared to REST. The speed is definitely a disadvantage of SOAP.

You might also consider enabling the WSDL-Cache and disabling automatic indexing to speed up SOAP imports. Check out this Blogpost (in German, google translate might help): Performance Tests with product import via SOAP (in German).