Avoiding a 100ms http request to slow down the REST API where it's called from

Question

I'm developing a multiplayer Android game with push notifications by using Google GCM. My web server has a REST API. Most of the requests sent to this API send a request to Google GCM server to send a notification to the opponent.

The thing is on average, a call to my API is ~140 ms long, and ~100 ms is due to the http request sent to Google server.

What can I do to speed up this? I was thinking (I have full control of my server, my stack is Bottle/gunicorn/nginx) of creating an independent process with a database that will try to send a queue of GCM requests, but maybe there's a much simpler way to do that directly in bottle or in pure python.

Answer 1

I've solved my problem thanks to this thread:

I'm using Celery to send my notifications through a task queue. I can't believe how simple it is!

Thanks anyway :)

Answer 2

The problem is that your clients are waiting for your server to send the GCM push notifications. There is no logic to this behavior.

You need to change your server-side code to process your API requests, close the connection to your client, and only then send the push notifications.

Answer 3

The best thing you can do is making all networking asynchronous, if you don't do this yet.

The issue is that there will always be users with a slow internet connection and there isn't a generic approach to bring them fast internet :/. Other than that, ideas are to

• send only few small packets or one huge in favor of many small packets (that's faster)
• use UDP over TCP, UDP being connectionless and naturally faster