Performance tuning (API and UI)

This guide collects pragmatic tips that improve Airflow performance for API and UI workloads.

Custom metadata indexes

If you observe slowness in some API calls or specific UI views, you should inspect query plans and add indexes yourself that match your workload. Listing endpoints and UI table views with specific ordering criteria are likely to benefit from additional indexes if you have a large volume of metadata.

When to use

Slow API list/detail endpoints caused by frequent scans or lookups on columns like start_date, timestamps (e.g. dttm), or status fields.
UI pages that load large lists or perform heavy filtering on metadata tables.

Guidance

Inspect the query planner (e.g., EXPLAIN/EXPLAIN ANALYZE) for slow endpoints and identify missing indexes.
Prefer single or composite indexes that match your most common ordering logic, typically the order_by query parameter used in API calls. Composite indexes can cover multi criteria ordering.
Your optimal indexes depend on how you use the API and UI; there is no one-size-fits-all set we can ship by default.

Upgrade considerations

To avoid conflicts with Airflow database upgrades, delete your custom indexes before running an Airflow DB upgrade and re-apply them after the upgrade succeeds.

Notes

Review query plans (e.g. via EXPLAIN) to choose effective column sets and ordering for your workload.
Composite indexes should list columns in selectivity order appropriate to your most common predicates.
Indexes incur write overhead; add only those that materially improve your read paths.

Enable HTTP/2 at the reverse proxy

Browsers limit concurrent HTTP/1.1 connections to six per origin. Views such as the Grid page can issue many API requests at once, causing some of them to queue and stall until a connection slot becomes available.

Enabling HTTP/2 at the reverse-proxy layer (e.g. Nginx) removes this limitation because HTTP/2 multiplexes many requests over a single TCP connection.

Benefits

Eliminates the six-connection bottleneck for busy UI views.
Reduces latency through header compression and stream multiplexing.
No changes to Airflow itself are required — configuration is done entirely at the proxy level.

How to enable

HTTP/2 is configured on the reverse proxy that sits in front of the Airflow API server. For Nginx, add the http2 directive to the listen line:

server {
    listen 443 ssl http2;
    # ... existing Airflow proxy configuration ...
}

For details on running Airflow behind a reverse proxy, see Running Airflow behind a reverse proxy.