TWS API vs REST API | TWS on a VPS

[petdomaa100]

A friend and I have been working on a hobby project using the IBKR Gateway REST API. The project is basically feature-complete, but we hit a wall during stress testing. Whenever the contract in question is a bit obscure, the entire system falls apart because the REST API is so unreliable.

I've never seen something like this before. Often, the API responses seem entirely arbitrary, claiming that things succeeded or failed with no connection to what actually happened. Sometimes, back-to-back requests with the same parameters yield entirely different answers. I can share a detailed breakdown of the long list of specific issues if anyone's interested, but the core problem is simple: it doesn't seem like we can build a reliable system on top of this API.

I would love to talk to somebody who managed to make this work in production.

For those experienced with the TWS API, how does it compare? Our initial research pointed us toward the REST API as the easier path, but this has been the most problematic API we've encountered in any project. Is the TWS API more stable in practice?

Secondly, how feasible is it to run the TWS API on a VPS? The REST API's Java gateway app was a bit frustrating to deploy initially, but I managed to compile it to a native binary, which made everything super simple.

Any insights, experiences, or workarounds would be incredibly helpful. Thanks in advance!