Wherein I occasionally rant on various topics including, but not limited to, PHP, Music, and whatever other Topics I find interesting at the moment, including my brain tumor surgery of August 2010.

Wednesday, June 03, 2009

Facebook Performance

I've been logging calls to Facebook API servers in my DEV environment for some weeks now.

I'm pretty disappointed by the performance, overall:
Facebook API Call Performance Stats

I realize Facebook has scalability issues beyond my ken, but they also have resources beyond my ken as well...

Facebook doesn't wait over 4 seconds for my server; Surely I shouldn't have to wait 30 seconds for theirs! :-)

In fact, it's kind of pointless in the context of a canvas page for their servers to bother to respond at all after 4 seconds...

User --A--> Facebook server request canvas page --B--> Request to my server --C--> API Call to Facebook server.

If C can detect that we are in the context of a canvas page, and Facebook already knows that B will not wait more than X seconds, they might as well issue an HTTP 408 Request Timeout or something similar after X seconds, because there's no real point in them giving me the info they aren't going to wait for...

I went ahead and created a Feature Request in Facebook's Bugzilla. You can vote for it if you think it will help you.
#5528