Chris Fry, of Salesforce.com recently posted a long blog entry entitled, “Why over 40% of Salesforce.com’s traffic is Web Services.” It’s an interesting read, and really a decent marketing piece for those technically oriented. Let me give another view.
One of my SFDC clients makes anywhere from 30,000 - 100,000+ queries to the API per day in just one of his integrations. In fact, if noone touches any records he’ll make over 27,000 queries to the API on any given day. If we add in the number of subsequent query(), retrieve(), create() or update() calls we’re looking at anywhere from 50,000 - 200,000+ calls a day. (Depends on how busy people are.)
Yes, this client is likely responsible for up to 2% of the total API calls (from the figures in the blog above), yet represents 0.0025% of SFDC’s subscriber count (from their homepage). Here’s the question I’d like to ask:
Why do I think that 95% of those API calls shouldn’t have to be made? (I’d have gone with 40% for effect, but frankly, it’s really more like 95%…)