Why is Eikon API so slow to retrieve data on economic indicators ?

@alexandros.pantalis
To give you an accurate and comprehensive advice it would be very helpful to know what your objective and end to end workflow are with regard to market data retrieval. E.g. on a daily or weekly basis I monitor X number of economic releases that come out today and I would like to be notified of the released figure as quickly as possible after the release. Or I retrieve X number of economic indicators as a snapshot in a batch request every day at a set time and I'm concerned that with sequential data retrieval it takes one to two thousand seconds to retrieve 1 thousand RICs. It would also be very helpful to understand what your benchmark for the retrieval time is. I.e. when you say that the retrieval time of 1-2 seconds is too slow, what do you compare it to?
As a general comment I'd say that if you're counting milliseconds then any market data terminal product with data delivery over the Internet would be the wrong product for you. I would suggest you consider an Enterprise solution such as Elektron datafeed on a dedicated circuit. However if for whatever reason you're limited in your product choice to market data terminal, then I should try to explain the data retrieval mechanism and what you should expect in terms of data retrieval times. When you retrieve snapshot market data using Eikon Python API the data is retrieved via HTTP from Thomson Reuters datacenter. When you use Eikon COM or .NET APIs you retrieve the data via a proprietary protocol. For a snapshot request it is still a round trip to the market data infrastructure, which in the case of Eikon Hosted account (with data delivery over the Internet) is located at Thomson Reuters data center. We don't do benchmarking of snapshot data retrieval times via Eikon COM or .NET APIs vs. Eikon Python API. I expect them to be in the same order of magnitude (unless you have market data infrastructure on premises, in which case Eikon COM or .NET APIs will retrieve data faster). You may be able to shed off milliseconds by switching to .NET API, but there's no guarantee. If rather than retrieving data as a snapshot you subscribe to live datastream using Eikon COM or .NET APIs, then at the time the economic indicator update is released you receive push notification from market data infrastructure at TR data center. In this case your data retrieval is not a round trip. For the first use case I described at the top of this message, subscribing to live updates is what I would recommend.