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Discussion on Response Time

Explore how to calculate API response times by analyzing parallel and serial processing methods for GET and POST requests. Understand factors affecting latency and response time, and discover practical optimization strategies including caching, database tuning, and CDN use to design efficient product architectures.

Calculate response time using parallel processing

Let’s use the equation for response time with which we are already acquainted:

In parallel processing, the API gateway communicates with all the subservices simultaneously, as shown in the following illustration:

Parallel processing from API gateway to downstream services
Parallel processing from API gateway to downstream services

We’ll use the processing time to calculate the response time of an API. For that, recall the latency numbers we estimated in the latency lesson to measure the response time of GET and POST requests. Let’s populate the numbers in equation (1):

  • Response time for a GET request=331.42 ms+4 ms=335.42 ms= 331.42\ ms + 4\ ms = 335.42\ ms

  • Response time for a POST request=805.48 ms+4 ms=809.48 ms= 805.48\ ms + 4\ ms = 809.48\ ms ...