How to reduce latency of data sent through a REST api

Posted by Sid on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by Sid
Published on 2010-03-26T09:39:19Z Indexed on 2010/03/26 9:43 UTC
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Filed under:

compression

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ruby-on-rails

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latency

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python

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network

I have an application which obtains data in JSON format from one of our other servers. The problem I am facing is, there is is significant delay when when requesting for this information. Since a lot of data is passed (approx 1000 records per request where each record is pretty huge) is there a way that compression would help reducing the speed. If so which compression scheme would you recommend.

I read on another thread that they pattern of data also matters a lot on they type of compression that needs to be used. The pattern of data is consistent and resembles the following

 :desc=>some_description
 :url=>some_url
 :content=>some_content
 :score=>some_score
 :more_attributes=>more_data

Can someone recommend a solution to how I could reduce this delay. They delay is approx 6-8 seconds. I'm using Ruby on Rails to develop this application and the server providing the data uses Python for the most part.

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