5 Lines of Code and My API Went from Snooze Mode to Full Throttle! 💤➡️⚡
Sometimes, performance breakthroughs come not from rewriting massive chunks of code, but from seeing the invisible bottleneck hiding in plain sight.
Recently, while debugging an existing bulk save API (~200 entries), I stumbled upon one of those moments. Despite having clean validation logic and efficient database operations, the API was taking far longer than expected.
The Culprit: Slow ID Generation
After some profiling, I found that unique ID generation for each entry was being handled by pyscrypt — a library built for cryptographic key derivation, not lightweight ID creation.
I ran a quick benchmark comparing pyscrypt with Python’s uuid4() for generating 200 entries on my local machine:
- pyscrypt: ~294 seconds 😵💫
- uuid4: ~0.006 seconds ⚡
Sure, results vary across machines, but that gap is not a rounding error — it’s a canyon.
Why the Drastic Difference?
Because pyscrypt is designed to be slow.
Its purpose is to hash passwords securely by consuming CPU and memory, protecting against brute-force attacks. In contrast, UUIDs are meant to be fast, unique identifiers — lightweight and perfectly suited for this use case.
The Fix: 5 Lines That Changed Everything
Once I understood the issue, the fix was laughably simple — a five-line pull request replacing pyscrypt with uuid.uuid4() for ID generation.
The result?
A 90%+ performance improvement for end users.
The API went from sluggish to snappy — from snooze mode to full throttle.
And for those who measure productivity by Lines of Code (LOC):
5 lines. 90% improvement. Who needs 1000 lines anyway? 😆
Lessons Learned
- Always question hidden assumptions in your system — “it works” doesn’t mean “it’s optimal.”
- Cryptographic libraries ≠ general-purpose tools. Use them only when security truly demands it.
- At senior levels, debugging and reasoning often trump raw coding speed.
This was a neat reminder that writing code is easy — the real art lies in diagnosing the invisible.
In summary: performance tuning isn’t about magic — it’s about clarity. The sooner you understand why something drags, the faster you can make it fly.