RESTful API vs. GraphQL a CRUD performance comparison

Sammanfattning: The utilization of Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) has experiencedsignificant growth due to the increasing number of applications being devel-oped. APIs serve as a means to transfer data between different applications.While RESTful has been the standard API since its emergence around 2000,it is now being challenged by Facebook’s GraphQL, which was introducedin 2015. This study aims to fill a knowledge gap in the existing literatureon API performance evaluation by extending the focus beyond read opera-tions to include CREATE, UPDATE, and DELETE operations in both REST-ful APIs and GraphQL. Previous studies have predominantly examined theperformance of read operations, but there is a need to comprehensively un-derstand the behavior and effectiveness of additional CRUD operations. Toaddress this gap, we conducted a series of controlled experiments and anal-yses to evaluate the response time and RAM utilization of RESTful APIsand GraphQL when executing CREATE, UPDATE, and DELETE operations.We tested various scenarios and performance metrics to gain insights into thestrengths and weaknesses of each approach. Our findings indicate that con-trary to our initial beliefs, there are no significant differences between the twoAPI technologies in terms of CREATE, UPDATE, and DELETE operations.However, RESTful did slightly outperform GraphQL in the majority of tests.We also observed that GraphQL’s inherent batching functionality resulted infaster response times and lower RAM usage throughout the tests. On the otherhand, RESTful, despite its simpler queries, exhibited faster response times inGET operations, consistent with related work. Lastly, our findings suggestthat RESTful uses slightly less RAM compared to GraphQL in the context ofCREATE, UPDATE, and DELETE operations.