API Ratings Summary November 2020 | Twitter Wins

API Ratings: Performance

For our API ratings, we look at over 100 APIs and pull all the metrics together to give you a general feeling for the service quality for an organization’s APIs in a particular API ratings category with our patented CASC score.

Something of interest

Twitter is a good example of a performant API, topping the Social Networks category this month with a fine CASC score of 9.57 in what is a fairly competitive category, with 5 of the 10 APIs having a CASC score of over 9.00 and only one API being in the Amber Zone.

Twitter has a 100% pass rate and is third fastest with the lowest number of outliers, so this is a reliable API. Here we see the latency for the Twitter User Profile Fetch endpoint. It’s pretty stable within the 250-500 ms range with just one – and very obvious outlier (interestingly with the second slowest call for the month very close to it). This is how and endpoint should behave.

It’s interesting to compare the 18 November outlier with a typical call. The call was made from Azure US west, so nowhere exotic. The rate-determining step was the HTTPS handshake, which took 18,291 ms. The Download time was pretty slow too at 1258 ms. This looks like a network issue. For Twitter, these issues happen so rarely that it might just be the kind of one-off network glitch you get from time to time. It could be there’s much to be done about and little point in worrying about such a rare occurrence.

By comparison, our typical results is from somewhere exotic, OpenHost Auckland in New Zealand, but has a HTTPS handshake of 86 ms and a Download Time of 0 ms. Much more like what Twitter usually delivers! Note that the processing time is 227 ms versus just 86 ms for the outlier, so there’s always a degree to which there is some extra speed that you can squeeze out (and you can’t do anything about the size of the Earth or the speed of light yet).

API Ratings: Overall Quality

November 2020

Category	Organization	CASC score
Corporate Infrastructure	Pivotal Tracker	9.40
COVID-19	ECDC	9.03
Search	Google	9.20
Social Networks	Twitter	9.57
UK Government	GOV.UK	9.48
US Government	Department of Justice	9.64

Only 2 out of the 6 categories are topped by an API with a CASC score of over 9.50. Department of Justice in the US Government takes the overall top spot for the public sector with a CASC score of 9.64, down from 9.83 last month.

API Ratings: Top Performers by Latency

November 2020

Category	Organization	Median Latency
Corporate Infrastructure	Microsoft Office	224 ms
COVID-19	CDC tools	158 ms
Search	Facebook	387 ms
Social Networks	Google	57 ms
UK Government	Police.UK	81 ms
US Government	Department of Justice	49 ms

Department of Justice in the US Government category takes the overall title for the public sector again with a median latency of 49, down from 51 ms, the same as last month.

API Ratings: Worst Quality

November 2020

Category	Organization	CASC score
Corporate Infrastructure	Adobe Stock Images	6.89
COVID-19	thevirustracker.com	6.58
Search	Foursquare	7.59
Social Networks	Foursquare	7.38
UK Government	NHS	6.55
US Government	NASA	7.87

NHS in the UK Government category takes the overall wooden spoon this month a CASC score of 6.55. See you again in a month as we will also be looking back at 2020. Also, don’t forget to check out our weekly API ratings reports each week and the monthly and weekly financial API reports.

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