API not responding within 20 minutes to seemingly simple request

[davidherbert2]

I've sent the following request for all NO2 sensor readings in the Air Quality theme for a 3 hour period. No response received after 20 minutes. Have tried it several times this afternoon, and similar requests intermittently over the past few weeks. I am not expecting to receive much data back, however I'm not sure whether this assumption is correct? Maybe this call is actually returning all the sensor telemetry/diagnostic info, and I should be using something else? It would be helpful if the API docs gave example returns for the sample requests. Here's the request:

http://uoweb3.ncl.ac.uk/api/v1.1/sensors/data/json/?starttime=20190523120000&endtime=20190523150000&theme=Air+Quality&data_variable=NO2&bbox_p1_x=-1.7353&bbox_p1_y=54.9484&bbox_p2_x=-1.4298&bbox_p2_y=55.0563

Even adding "last_n_records=100" makes no difference. Still no response.

My eventual goal is to be able to call the UO API from Ajax requests in a front-end application, possibly linking said requests to the progress of a timeslider, so I need these requests to take a few seconds max. Should this not be realistic, is it possible to get a more low-level access to the data directly via the database? The only way I can see otherwise of doing this is doing a bulk daily download at night and ingesting into my own PostGIS instance. This seems to defeat the purpose of the API, and uses up large amounts of space on a VM anyway. BTW I see I could get all the relevant sensor names and get the readings for each individually, which seems rather longwinded.

[geoanorak]

Thanks David, we'll take a look. The API has been a bit of an issue for a while with larger calls.

[nharris172]

This should now be faster.

[davidherbert2]

Yep - can confirm that this request now takes 4-5 seconds to execute. Thanks Neil.