Here's an exciting benchmark.

The goal is to simply collect the previous 50,000 comments from the AskReddit subreddit in batches of 5,000.

Here's how the current API performed:

Collected 50,000 comments in 53.79 seconds. (929 comments per second)

And here's how the new API performs:

Collected 50,000 comments in 10.0 seconds. (5,000 comments per second)

You can try out the new dev API with this script:

#!/usr/bin/env python3

import requests
import ujson as json
import time
from collections import defaultdict
from lru import LRU #pip3 install lru-dict


def query_es(t=None,subreddit=None):

    q = defaultdict(dict)
    headers = {'Content-Type':'application/json'}
    q['query']['bool'] = {}
    q['query']['bool']['must'] = m = []
    q['sort'] = {'created_utc':'desc'}
    q['size'] = batch_size
    m.append({'match':{'subreddit':subreddit}})
    m.append({'range':{'created_utc':{'lte':t}}})
    r = requests.get("http://dev.pushshift.io/rc/_search",headers=headers,data=json.dumps(q))
return r.json()


created_utc = None
batch_size = 5000
seen_ids = LRU(batch_size * 2)
count = 0
start_time = time.time()
subreddit = "askreddit"
cutoff = 50000

while True:

    data = query_es(created_utc,subreddit)
    c_flag = False

    for d in data['hits']['hits']:
        id = int(d['_id'])
        d = d['_source']
        if id in seen_ids:
            continue
        count  = 1
        c_flag = True
        seen_ids[id] = True
        created_utc = d['created_utc']
        if count == cutoff:
            c_flag = False
            break


    if not c_flag:
        break

    print("Got {} {} comments. Current position: {}".format(count,subreddit,time.strftime("%Z - %Y/%m/%d, %H:%M:%S", time.localtime(created_utc))))

end_time = time.time() - start_time

print("Collected {:,} comments from {} in {:,} seconds. ({:,} comments per second)".format(count,subreddit,round(end_time,2),int(count/end_time)))