Reducing connection wait time for APIs in Flutter

Question

I'm trying to optimize API response time for my Flutter app. I have an API where I've added server level caching and I'm using Dio for my API needs.

The reponse time when tested on Postman is ~100ms. Getting similar metrics on Chrome developer tools.

The problems is when I measure the response time on Flutter DevTools, all responses are >250ms. Upon checking, I find that there's a connection wait time of ~200ms for every request.

How can I reduce the above wait time for Flutter?

I tried switching libraries and reusing the same https client as suggested here and in the docs of http but the wait time for subsequent requests remained similar.

var client = http.Client();
final res = await client.get(...);

How can I avoid these connection delays and get the optimum performance? If caching the SSL, DNS Lookup etc is the solution, how do I do that in flutter?

Answer 1

To reduce connection wait time for APIs in Flutter, you can:

1. Use a connection pool to reuse existing connections
2. Enable compression to reduce the size of requests and responses
3. Enable SSL pinning to validate SSL certificates
4. Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN) to cache frequently accessed resources
5. Use Flutter profiling tools to identify bottlenecks in your code

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