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Fastest way to create/update ~6,600 records via API? (targeting under 1 minute)

  • January 14, 2026
  • 1 reply
  • 39 views
eric.aguerreberry
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I’m building an integration that needs to sync ~6,600 records from an external API to Airtable, ideally in under 1 minute.

Currently I’m hitting the standard REST API limits (10 records/request, 5 requests/second = ~2-3 minutes minimum, but in practice it’s taking 10-13 minutes due to network latency).

I’ve looked into: ∙ Sync API (CSV) - but the table becomes read-only, and I’m seeing significant processing delays after the request completes ∙ REST API with performUpsert - works but slow at scale

Has anyone found a faster approach to bulk insert/update thousands of records? Any workarounds or techniques I’m missing?

For context: manual CSV import through the UI takes ~5 minutes for the same data.

Airtable Consultant & Certified Softr Expert

1 reply

Alexey_Gusev
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Hi,
Even when data already exists inside Airtable, when you try to create new records using scripting, the speed is approximately 50 records/sec, 2+ minutes in your case.
But I found that when I added 3300 records to the existing table from Google Sheets integration, it took about 10 seconds to import all data. The data is 10 text fields with a low amount of text, in total, 200 Kb in CSV format. I think, in this case data size matters more, than amount of records. I don’t know whether it may help you, at least you can dig in that direction.

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