Comparative Analysis of RESTful, GraphQL, and gRPC APIs: Perfomance Insight from Load and Stress Testing

Backend constitutes a critical component of digital infrastructure, responsible for processing business logic, managing data, and facilitating communication between software systems. APIs serve as the interface that enables software interaction and plays a pivotal role in backend operations. This st...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Steven Chandra, Ahmad Farisi
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: LPPM ISB Atma Luhur 2025-01-01
Series:Jurnal Sisfokom
Subjects:
Online Access:https://jurnal.atmaluhur.ac.id/index.php/sisfokom/article/view/2375
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:Backend constitutes a critical component of digital infrastructure, responsible for processing business logic, managing data, and facilitating communication between software systems. APIs serve as the interface that enables software interaction and plays a pivotal role in backend operations. This study investigates the performance of three API architectures: RESTful, GraphQL, and gRPC. The experimental approach involves the implementation of Load Testing and Stress Testing to assess the performance of these architectures. The experiment utilizes a dedicated server and client hardware to simulate real-world conditions, with parameters such as CPU usage, memory usage, response time, load time, latency, success rate, and failure rate evaluated using a dataset comprising 1,000 rows of student-related records. Result show that RESTful achieves the highest total request but exhibit greater resource consumption and a higher failure rate. GraphQL demonstrated better CPU and memory efficiency with strong stability, though it has higher latency and slower response times. gRPC strikes a balance with a moderate latency and resource usage, albeit with slightly higher memory consumption under stress. By presenting a comprehensive analysis of each API architecture, this study contributes a comprehensive performance analysis under practical testing scenarios giving developers and system architect with data-driven guidance for selecting API architecture to their application needs. RESTful is well suited for high-throughput scenarios with less critical operations, GraphQL excels in resource efficiency and stability, and gRPC offers balanced performance across diverse workloads.
ISSN:2301-7988
2581-0588