OK, for large busy teams the team match endpoint is already unusable. Simply fetching from the endpoint, no drama. Iterating over the results to fetch each match profile to find the start time of the match results in things like this:
$ /usr/bin/time ./active-team-members team-russia
1376.24 real 11.52 user 0.66 sys
That's in seconds. No, the network connection wasn't optimal. But without substantial caching, that's too slow. And to cache data means not only having persistent storage, but data normalisation skills as both club names and player names can and do change.
For the professional programmers here, irritating but not a drama. For the less-experienced people who are writing useful applications, effectively requiring them to learn RDBMS data normalisation ... it ain't hard, but it isn't a small topic either.
Those times are in seconds. Note that it's all network latency (or bandwidth, maybe, but I'm betting on latency). No local CPU time is needed. Looking up Team Russia's matches to be able to sort them by start time took 23 minutes elapsed.
We perhaps could live with 23 minutes: Team Russia is a large club, and many are smaller.
But now think about live matches, and a team which plays several per day. Mm. I'd really like a little more data (start_time being the first and most essential) included in match profile data, so that per-match endpoint accesses may be minimised.
Thanks again for your consideration.
Edit: URL corrrected per @Tricky_Dicky's post #3.
https://www.chess.com/news/view/published-data-api#pubapi-endpoint-club-matches
It would be very helpful to me to have start_time included in the above endpoint, where one is set, or where the match is "in_progress" or "finished".
I am writing a report on which members of a club are active. I would like not to have to pull down all match data ever for a club, and if start_time were included I could ignore, say, matches older than 12 months without having to download their data.
Thanks for your consideration.
[ Priority? So far, not so bad; downloading match data for a team is faster than I thought it would be. I've not tried for Team Russia or The Power of Chess. They would be painful. ]