Legacy (v1)
Troubleshooting
Understand legacy Version 1 response-time variability and choose resilient client timeouts for existing integrations.
This section describes known issues and recommended workarounds when integrating with the API.
Handle variable response times
The API depends on the Airtable API, which can exhibit significant latency with large variation. We believe this is likely caused by cold starts on Airtable’s side, though this has not been fully confirmed.
- Mutation requests typically complete within 500–1000 ms, but can take up to 20 seconds in rare cases.
- Schema requests involve database introspection and usually take 3–8 seconds on the first request.
For read-only fetch requests, the API applies a caching layer. After the initial request, subsequent calls are significantly faster.
Configure client-side timeouts of at least 15 seconds, and preferably longer, to avoid failures caused by upstream latency.
Improving response time consistency is a core focus for the next major API release.
Get help
If you encounter issues or unexpected behavior, feel free to get in touch. We are happy to help troubleshoot and assist with your integration.
Keep in touch with the latest
Sign up for our monthly deep dives - straight to your inbox.