Hello!
I have started migrating some of my workloads to Agent API as per Perplexity recommendation I received in the email (Subject: "Your Sonar workload runs better on Agent API").
I have couple of use cases on Finance Search and Web Search with Agent API and my observations after first two days of usage are:
Agent API is much slower than Sonar API, one roundtrip takes easily 12 - 15 seconds with API preset “low”.
During the U.S. business hours, I am frequently facing timeouts on my HTTP POST requests with 30 seconds time-out. Most of the time, I get the HTTP 200 response within the preset 3 retries, but sometimes even 3 retries won’t cut it and the API call fails.
Are there any options to speed things up and make them more reliable?
I have a relatively large number of investment instruments (stocks, bonds) where I am using finance search (for stocks) and web search (for bonds) to retrieve some metadata. With 5000 instruments on the list, full run (single threaded) would take approximately 22 hours (!).
We’ll be glad to look into this and provide fixes and/or recommendations. Could you please send a sample of request ID’s as well as request bodies to api@perplexity.ai? This will allow us to look at exactly what is going on.
I will revert with the solutions in this thread for full visibility.
Albert, thank you for a prompt response!
I just sent the requested log to api@perplexity.ai few minutes ago.
Please let me know whether you have everything you need for the investigation.
Hi @YardaG — following up as promised, with the resolution plus some general guidance for anyone moving from Sonar to the Agent API.
What we found
We ran your exact payloads against the live API. The latency traced back to reasoning effort: presets set both a model tier and a default reasoning effort, and the low preset’s default was spending reasoning tokens on every step. For a deterministic task like yours — classifying instruments into a fixed taxonomy under a strict JSON schema — that effort doesn’t improve the output. Add 1–4 tool invocations per request and round-trips ended up straddling your 30s client timeout.
What changed
We’ve updated the low preset so it now defaults to minimal reasoning. So no code change is needed on your side, you should be set to retest.
Re-running your six instruments (3x each, 18 calls total) on the updated preset: median round-trip ~9s, all calls between ~5s and ~21s, 18/18 successful with zero timeouts and no retries. Before, 9 of 14 attempts timed out and the successes were landing at 18–26s.
If you want to pin the behavior explicitly rather than rely on the preset default, you can set it per request:
preset: "fast" is also a fine option and benchmarks similarly, with slightly more variability on ambiguous issuers.
Sonar → Agent API: a mental model
Sonar is built for single-pass, search-grounded answers: query → search → answer. It’s optimized for exactly that shape of task.
The Agent API is a loop: the model can plan, call tools (web_search, finance_search, …), evaluate results, iterate, then emit output conforming to your schema. You control how much of that machinery each request uses.
Presets are effort tiers, not speed dials.fast → xhigh trade latency and cost for depth. Pick the lowest tier that solves your task, then tune from there.
Reasoning effort is an independent knob. You can keep a preset and dial reasoning separately. Rule of thumb: extraction and classification → minimal; multi-hop research and synthesis → the default or higher.
Latency scales with what the loop does. Tool invocations, reasoning effort, and output size each add time. A request that retrieves, reasons, and validates is doing more than one that only generates.
Over to you
Building on the Agent API? Share what you’re working on in the thread — questions, setups, edge cases, all are welcome.