Chris Webb shows us how we can batch calls to M-driven web services:
One of the most common issues faced when calling web services in M is that the the easiest way of doing so – creating a function that calls the web service, then calling the function once per row in a table using the Invoke Custom Function button – is very inefficient. It’s a much better idea to batch up calls to a web service, if the web service supports this, but doing this forces you to write more complex M code. It’s a problem I wrestled with last year in my custom connector for the Cognitive Services API, and in that case I opted to create functions that can be passed lists instead (see here for more information on how functions with parameters of type list work); I’m sure the developers working on the new AI features in dataflows had to deal with the same problem. This problem is not limited to web services either: calculations such as running totals also need to be optimised in the same way if they are to perform well in M. The good news is that there is a new M function Function.ScalarVector() that allows you to create functions that combine the ease-of-use of row-by-row requests with the efficiency of batch requests.
As Chris notes in the post and in the comments, this is mostly useful when you can batch together individual calls to improve performance. For functions which operate serially (like opening Excel workbooks), you won’t see much (if any) gain.