ArangoDB 2.6 provides a specialized export API for exporting all documents from a collection and shipping them to a client application. It is rather limited but faster than the general-purpose AQL cursor API and can store its snapshots using less memory.

export_api

A side effect of the speedup is that the first results will arrive much earlier in the client application. This will help in reducing client connection timeouts in case clients are enforcing them on temporarily non-responding connections.

The following table shows the execution times for fetching the first 1,000 documents from collections of different sizes, both with via the cursor API and the export API. Figures for the cursor API are shown for ArangoDB 2.5 and 2.6 (the version in which it was rewritten):
export_api_performance

Read more about the new export API in Jan’s blog post on more efficient data exports.