Netflix API Developer Blog

Every seasoned software engineering manager has been faced with the "features vs. ship date" trade-off.  As we neared our API launch date two weeks ago, there were two issues affecting the API's performance that we decided to defer in the interest of getting the API into your hand ASAP.  One issue was with a bug in the request routing between the developer, regional API proxies, and our API backend.  The other issue was a temporary inability to support inline gzip compression.

I'm happy to announce that the first issue has already been resolved, and we're seeing roughly a 6x performance increase in our testing on a high-bandwidth Internet connection.  Tests with an API client on a very slow broadband connection are showing a similar, order-of-magnitude, performance improvement.

The GZip fix should provide yet another, order-of-magnitude, performance improvement.  We hope to make this fix available to you in the very near future.