We have recently switched over to the new Google People API on our sync platform. We chose to only do this for newly set up connections for now so to determine the impact.
Functionally all seems to work fine, so no actual bugs to be raised. However we noticed that the performance of the People API seems to be much lower compared to the Contacts API. More specifically we saw the following differences when summarising all requests of today:
- Creation response time: 571 ms (versus 201 ms on the old Contacts API)
- Update response time: 735 ms (versus 168 ms on the old Contacts API)
There are also differences in the other operations, but especially the difference in the response time of persists is clear. Even more, the batch persist operation on the old Contacts API was going faster on average (we use a batch size of up to 30 records) than a single create/update operation on the People API.
Is this something that can be improved in the near future? It is not really blocking our end users, but it does lead to degraded sync performance. Especially users with large contact sets will experience significantly longer syncing times (as we are syncing all historical contact data).
If you like, I can provide you with some example API requests and response calls.