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I need to update 500 records, my flow takes an hour

Almost every API has a batch endpoint that takes 50 or 100 records per call. Looping one-by-one costs 500 calls, batching does the same in 5 or 10. Quota, rate limiting and runtime get a lot better.

Try this first

  1. 1Check the docs for /bulk, /batch or /multipart endpoints, or a GraphQL mutation that accepts an array.
  2. 2Build the flow with an aggregator step (Make has Array Aggregator, n8n has Item Lists, Zapier has Looping) that groups rows into batches.
  3. 3Keep batch size under the API cap, often 100 or 250 per call. Too large gives 413 or timeouts, too small wastes calls.
  4. 4Handle errors per batch separately: if one record in a batch fails some APIs roll back the whole batch, others return per-record status.
  5. 5Keep a log of success and failure records, otherwise you don't know which to retry after a partial failure.

When to bring us in

If your source API has no batch and you handle thousands of records daily, we can look at staging via a dedicated DB with flush.

See also

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