Improve performance when loading parameters

Question

I'm using the AWS Parameter Store in order to save parameters to be used by my Lambda functions(env variables), 4 parameters actually. But I am observing some performance issues when loading them, It is taking between 0.2 and 0.6 secs to load one parameter only, which is a lot of time for my web app.

I measured the time by running this command

time aws ssm get-parameter --name "sample_parameter"

I would expect less time in order to load the parameter value, since I need to get 4 parameters. So here is my question...Is it a good pracite to load parameters as json text? so I could put all these 4 parameters within a json object. Is there something to do in order to improve performance when calling the get parameter function?

Thanks

Answer 1

You can get all the parameters at once using the get-parameters. In my tests it's averages the same time to get all 4 parameters in a single call as it does to get 1.

$ time aws ssm get-parameter --name w1
{
    "Parameter": {
        "Name": "w1",
        "Type": "String",
        "Value": "say anything",
        "Version": 1,
        "LastModifiedDate": 1566914540.044,
        "ARN": "arn:aws:ssm:us-east-1:1234567890123:parameter/w1"
    }
}

real    0m0.811s
user    0m0.509s
sys     0m0.095s

$ time aws ssm get-parameters --names w1 w2 w3 w4
{
    "Parameters": [
        {
            "Name": "w1",
            "Type": "String",
            "Value": "say anything",
            "Version": 1,
            "LastModifiedDate": 1566914540.044,
            "ARN": "arn:aws:ssm:us-east-1:1234567890123:parameter/w1"
        },
        {
            "Name": "w2",
            "Type": "String",
            "Value": "say nothing",
            "Version": 1,
            "LastModifiedDate": 1566914550.377,
            "ARN": "arn:aws:ssm:us-east-1:1234567890123:parameter/w2"
        },
        {
            "Name": "w3",
            "Type": "String",
            "Value": "say what",
            "Version": 1,
            "LastModifiedDate": 1566914561.301,
            "ARN": "arn:aws:ssm:us-east-1:1234567890123:parameter/w3"
        },
        {
            "Name": "w4",
            "Type": "String",
            "Value": "say hello",
            "Version": 1,
            "LastModifiedDate": 1566914574.716,
            "ARN": "arn:aws:ssm:us-east-1:1234567890123:parameter/w4"
        }
    ],
    "InvalidParameters": []
}

real    0m0.887s
user    0m0.561s
sys     0m0.097s