GraphQL vs. REST : A Comparison of Runtime Performance

Sammanfattning

Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) are an important component in modern-day web applications. Representation State Transfer (REST) has been the de facto standard for building web APIs since its inception in 2000. In 2015 Facebook launched GraphQL, a technology with the purpose of solving some of the drawbacks of traditional REST APIs. However, few scientific studies have yet to assess the benefits and drawbacks of GraphQL vs REST from a performance standpoint. In this study, a controlled experiment was conducted to assess three categories of runtime performance: response time, CPU consumption and memory consumption. Results show that GraphQL consumes more server-side resources than REST, except in certain scenarios, while response time depends highly on the query. When fetching the same amount of data, REST is more efficient than GraphQL in every regard. Keywords: Web Development, Application Programming Interfaces, REST, GraphQL, Performance.