Great stuff, in case you are interested, I set up an SSD server just to test the differenced between the 2 APIs using ab settings of ab -k -n 8000 -c 100
So thats 100 concurrent requests running 8000 times gave the following results:
Old API:
Time taken for tests: 52.556 seconds
Requests per second: 152.22 [#/sec] (mean)
Load: Over 20 and rising while the test was running
New API:
Time taken for tests: 6.260 seconds
Requests per second: 1278.01 [#/sec] (mean)
Load: No appreciable increase
Obviously real world usage is different as thats just hitting a single URL but it's still a useful comparison