Connectors Performance Overview

Apollo Connectors are designed with performance in mind, providing efficient ways to incorporate REST APIs directly into your graph through the GraphOS Router.

Subgraph approach vs. direct integration

Before Connectors, integrating a REST API into your graph required spinning up a passthrough GraphQL API:

With Connectors, you eliminate the need for that additional service:

This architecture provides the following performance benefits:

• Reduced network hops with direct router-to-REST communication

• Lower operational complexity without additional services to deploy and maintain

Router performance overhead

The GraphOS Router is optimized to handle Connector requests with minimal overhead:

• Low latency processing of REST API requests and responses

• Parallel execution of independent REST API requests when possible

• Efficient response transformation through declarative mapping language that executes directly in the router runtime

When comparing direct REST calls to Connector-based integration, the additional router processing adds only milliseconds of overhead while providing the significant benefits of GraphQL's declarative data fetching.

Next steps

First, ensure that you're using batch requests whenever possible.

Additionally, the following configurations help prevent overwhelming backend services:

• Request limits (this is also a security feature)

• Traffic shaping