Optimization of GraphQL queries
Pavlo Zinchenko, Дмитро Борисович Мехед · TECHNICAL SCIENCES AND TECHNOLOGIES · 2025
Presented in the article information is an overview. Many companies use several service providers to provide their services to customers. Sometimes it is not enough to have basic monitoring in centralized monitoring systems, so companies need to set up the custom API integration for monitoring. To collect REST API data is the main option, but usually leads to many requests and a huge amount of useless data. GraphQL API as modern replacement for REST API could solve these problems, but only with the correct optimization. For effective monitoring using the GraphQL API, it is necessary to optimize queries, because unoptimized queries could lead to monitoring tools overload and long timing of data processing. The purpose of the article is to review practical ways to optimize GraphQL API requests from the client part using the example of popular CDN provider Cloudflare. This article shows ways to optimize GraphQL API queries by “filtering” and “querying multiple data nodes”. Based on examples of using the Cloudflare GraphQL API, these two optimization ways were manually analyzed. The “filtering” optimization allows reducing the amount of useless data received and avoiding data loss in some cases. The “querying multiple data nodes” optimization reduces the number of requests to the API and allows to get information from several parts of the API. Relevence of understanding limitations of service providers and correct formation of the GraphQL filters in queries are also analyzed within the article, because it could lead to the situation when data from the query will be duplicated. The article includes the actual example of optimizing GraphQL queries that confirms effective reviewed optimization methods — these methods allowed to speed up query execution and reduce the amount of information to be processed by several times. As a result, a correct GraphQL requests optimization increases effectiveness, accuracy and completeness of collected information.