After Apple essentially shut down Dark Sky early (you can't trust it if it's off-line 8 hours a day 2/3 days), I've transitioned production traffic to WeatherKit.
- Generally slower (higher p50's, significantly higher p90s)
- Under bursts of traffic, it just chokes. Always. I have many users who have things set up to retrieve the weather on the hour (e.g., 6:00am). I have to have a failover weather source for these peaks, because weather kits just stops returning data under heavy load.
It's not really acceptable that I'm paying significant $$$ for an API, and have to have another source for when the API predictably chokes.
Dark Sky handled the load without breaking a sweat. Ever.
I'm not sure what to do here. It's not an issue with the code, so there's no point in opening a code level support ticket. The feedback assistant refers you to the forums. General performance issues are not addressed by Apple engineers on the forums.
So, the whole thing is a bit Kafkaesque.
- Is stumbling under load expected behavior?
- Does Apple have any performance expectations for the API?
- I've never dealt with an API provider that you couldn't get some sort of acknowledgement about issues. It's just weird.