The 120ms Tax You're Paying for Convenience
Most algo traders reach for ccxt without questioning the cost. It's the Swiss Army knife of exchange APIs — one library, 100+ exchanges, uniform interface. But here's what the docs won't tell you: on Binance spot orders, ccxt adds 120ms of latency compared to hitting the REST API directly. On Upbit, the gap shrinks to 40ms, but it's still there.
I ran 1000 limit orders through both paths to see where the time goes. The results explain why HFT shops write custom exchange adapters and why your backtest-to-live performance gap might not be slippage at all.
The Test Setup: Same Orders, Two Paths
The benchmark is simple: place identical limit orders for BTC/USDT (Binance) and BTC/KRW (Upbit) through ccxt 4.2.58 and native REST APIs, measure elapsed time from function call to response. Each method runs 1000 times, cold starts excluded.
Hardware: M1 MacBook Pro, 400 Mbps fiber, South Korea (physically close to Upbit's Seoul servers, farther from Binance's Tokyo endpoints). Python 3.11, requests 2.31.0, ccxt 4.2.58.
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*Continue reading the full article on [TildAlice](https://tildalice.io/ccxt-native-api-order-speed-binance-upbit/)*
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