Slowness in calls on products, for example productCreate

Retired Boards Appdev Graphql Basics And Troubleshooting

Topic summary

Performance issue: GraphQL productCreate/productUpdate mutations sometimes take 5–10+ seconds. A request ID was shared, and the author asked whether they can access logs or if only Shopify can; this remains unanswered.

Root cause (for productUpdate): After testing different payloads (removing chunks of metafields and images), the slowness was traced mainly to image handling. The author had been resending images even when unchanged, which appears to be costly.

Action taken: Plan to send images only when they have actually changed to reduce latency.

Constraints: Shopify images appear not to support metafields (custom fields), preventing attaching an internal image ID or last-modified timestamp directly to the image.

Workarounds:

  • Encode an internal identifier in image altText to correlate images.
  • Store per-image data (IDs, timestamps, etc.) in a product-level JSON metafield.

Status: productUpdate performance issue is understood and mitigated; productCreate slowness is tolerated for now. Access to detailed request logs is still an open question.

Summarized with AI on January 29. AI used: gpt-5.
1

Has anyone had any experience of calls to productCreate (and productUpdate) taking longer than a second, for example I am see 5-10 seconds, maybe even more

I have an example: “x-request-id”: “2c24d6fe-6fc5-4dc7-8e6f-ffda10ed1b0b”

Am I able see the logs for that or is that a Shopify thing.

My guess is that it is to do with the amount of data (variants and variant- metadata fields) but I want to understand more about that

Thanks

Grant

2

For productUpdate, I will live with productCreate

I have worked this out.

I tried a number of different payloads in Shopify for a productUpdate, for example I removed chunks of metafields and images

I was able to narrow it down to the image part (mostly), this seems to be very slow. I tend to always send images, even if they haven’t changed which I don’t think is very good. I should only send them if they have changed

As far as I can see Shopify images don’t support metafields, which means you can’t unique identify the image with our own internal ID (we have worked around that my adding something into the altText). Without image metafields you also can’t add in a last modified date or something like that.

The only way I can see to store information abut the image, is to use a product level metafield that is json, and use that to store data all about the images

Thanks

Grant