API Latency Improvements and Revised SLOs
As more vulnerabilities are published to OSV.dev, we want to ensure our API remains fast and reliable for our users. To support this, we’ve rolled out a new database indexing strategy, resulting in API queries that are now up to 5x faster.
Source: Open Source Vulnerabilities Database · July 23, 2026 at 11:07 PM · AI-assisted report
KUALA LUMPUR, 24 JULY 2026 —
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Headline: API Latency Improvements and Revised SLOs Lead: As more vulnerabilities are published to OSV.dev, we want to ensure our API remains fast and reliable for our users. To support this, we’ve rolled out a new database indexing strategy, resulting in API queries that are now up to 5x faster. Body: As more vulnerabilities are published to OSV.dev, we want to ensure our API remains fast and reliable for our users. To support this, we’ve rolled out a new database indexing strategy, resulting in API queries that are now up to 5x faster.
Market Impact
Previously, the OSV.dev API was querying and serving its records from a large database entity that contained all fields necessary to build the vulnerability JSON from. This had a couple of drawbacks:
Now, we are storing the complete computed OSV records directly (including with populated alias/related/upstream fields from other records), and have a secondary table containing only the affected version information of the vulnerabilities, which we perform matching against. This has some significant benefits:
These database changes allow us to serve data much more efficiently, having a significant improvement on our API’s overall performance.
This change is now fully rolled out to production, and the impact on API latency can be seen below (solid line) compared to our old implementation (dashed line).
On average, the GET /v1/vulns/{id} endpoint is 5x faster, POST /v1/query is 2.5x faster, and POST /v1/querybatch is 3x faster.
Notably, this takes our batch query 95th percentile from ~10 seconds to ~3 seconds, which should significantly improve performance when performing dependency scanning.
With this new performance profile, we’ve adjusted our Service Level Objectives (SLOs) to better reflect the characteristics of the API, and are now tracking each endpoint separately. Our new SLOs are as follows:
With these API latency improvements in place, our next focus is on speeding up the ingestion and export pipelines. This will improve how quickly new vulnerability information is made available to OSV.dev users. Source: Open Source Vulnerabilities Database Published: 2025-10-14T00:00:00.000Z Region: OSINT Topic: Economy (AI-assisted rewrite, based on the original source)