Chunky interface meaning

Question

In the book of application architecture design, which I'am reading, I've found the following statement:

"To reduce round trips and improve communication performance, design chunky interfaces."

Can anybody explain me what does "chunky interface" mean?

Answer 1

A chunky interface is one where you minimise the amount of separate calls whilst accomplishing a task by maximising the work done by each call.

Here's an overview of chunky interfaces.

Answer 2

Basically, it refers to the amount of data transferred in one call. For example, if you wanted to get a set of data from a server, instead of asking

GetRecord(1);
GetRecord(2);
GetRecord(3);
GetRecord(4);

you'd design a batch method, like

GetRecords(1,4);

The idea is that the first design incurs four lots of overhead, but the second only one.