Company profile search slow response

API Issues
#1

Hi ,
We are using the following end point to retrieve company profile inforrmation
https://api.companieshouse.gov.uk/company/{company_number}

The issue we are facing is that the response time of the service is not consistent and some time we get response back in 7 second and some time it takes more then 60 seconds. What we have investigated so far is that the response time is really high if you search for a invalid company number which does not exist but matches the companies house number format . This results in a 404 but that response takes an average of 60 seconds. After that any subsequent search even for a valid company i.e. one which exist takes , take a lot of time. The response time returns to normal i.e. an average of 7sec when we have made 2-3 valid searches. We have one api account which is being used across the engineering landscape and we have not yet added any ip or domain restrictions on the account . And on an average we are making 2-3 call to the api per minutes.

#2

@mfairhurst can you help on the above issue

#3

Not a Companies House response, just another developer. However I just ran a series of tests and we’re getting a consistant response time of around 400-600 milliseconds for a succesful request and around 100 milliseconds for no result (404) for company profile queries (and some of that will be on our end). The different is so extreme that obviously something is up even with your succesfull/valid requests in terms of the time they’re taking, not to mention the fact that invalid responses are actually faster. Not sure if that’s any help, but it might eliminate the api itself as the cause of why you’re getting such slow responses. How are you sending the request?

#4

Thanks @ash for the response. I have just tested the API also and we are not experiencing the response times you are experiencing. If you could provide more details on the way you are accessing the service then maybe we can help.

Thanks,

Mark

#5

For the first time today (5th July 17), we are experiencing timeouts on the Company name search API. We are getting very few responses that actually do not timeout.

#6

That was specifically the search service. see Search API issues

#7

@mfairhurst I will gather some stats around performance next week and share them with you .