Thanks Yuval for your suggestion to use JProfiler. I ran my test in it, an although I don't have a lot of experience using profilers, I believe I've found that only about 25% of the time used was network overhead, and about 70% was XML processing.
This means that the axis client uses about 650 ms to process a ~120 KB SOAP reply, on a 2.4 GHz Intel CPU. The message is long but not complex (a table with 100 rows with two complex types per row). Does this sound reasonable to you guys? -- Regards André Risnes