Lets say that the API is well documented and every possible response field is described.
Should web application's server API exclude null fields in a JSON response to lower the amount of traffic? Is this a good idea at all?
I was trying to calculate the amount of traffic reduced for a large app like Twitter, and the numbers are actually quite convincing.
For example: if you exclude a single response field, "someGenericProperty":null
, which is 26 bytes, from every single API response, while Twitter is reportedly having 13 billion API requests per day, the amount of traffic reduction will be >300 Gb.
More than 300 Gb less traffic every day is quite a money saver, isn't it? That's probably the most naive and simplistic calculation ever, but still.
You should definitely include it if there is any need to distinguish between null and undefined since those have two different meanings in Javascript. You can think of null as meaning the property is unknown or meaningless, and undefined as meaning the property doesn't exist.
Null within the timeseries API means 'no data'. In case of errorcounts a zero means that we observed some user actions during that minute and none of those had an error attached. So the result is '0'.
In general, no. The more public the API and and the more potential consumers of the API, the more invariant the API should be.
In many applications, network latency is the dominating factor, not bandwidth. For performance reasons, many API developers will favor a few large request/responses over many small request/responses. At my last company, the sales and billing systems would routinely exchange messages of 100 KB, 200 KB or more. Sometimes only a few KB of the data was needed. But overall system performance was better than fetching some data, discovering more was needed then sending additional request for that data.
For most applications some inconsistency is more dangerous than superfluous data is wasteful.
As always, there are a million exceptions. I once interviewed for a job at a torpedo maintenance facility. They had underwater sensors on their firing range to track torpedoes. All sensor data were relayed via acoustic modems to a central underwater data collector. Acoustic underwater modems? Yes. At 300 baud, every byte counts.
There are battery-powered embedded applications where every bytes counts, as well as low-frequency RF communication systems.
Another exception is sparse data. For example, imagine a matrix with 4,000,000 rows and 10,000 columns where 99.99% of the values of the matrix are zero. The matrix should be represented with a sparse data structure that does not include the zeros.
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