A while back we had a discussion on whether Web Services are slow. Here is some data that I think concludes that SOAP can scale to high transaction rates (e.g. 300 million transactions a day). The test isn't a real-world test, but it does show that the overhead of SOAP processing is minimal with the latest toolkits.
Some quotes from the article. ---------- This article shows the latest performance results of Apache Axis2 vs. Codehaus XFire, both Java implementations. The results demonstrate that modern Web Services engines can perform at very high transaction rates. Axis2 using the default ADB binding framework shows outstanding performance, with consistently better results than XFire/JAXB or Axis2/JAXB. Using either toolkit, the overhead of using XML and SOAP is no longer a limiting factor in writing distributed systems for most applications (with may be the exception of trading floors!). While these tests do not perform 'real' work, the fact that a XML messaging system can scale to more than 10 million transactions an hour on a single quad-core server shows that Web services can be used for significant systems applications. --------- Read more here: http://wso2.org/library/588 My disclaimer - I co-authored the document and I'm a committer on the Axis2 and other Apache WS projects. -- Paul Fremantle http://bloglines.com/blog/paulfremantle [EMAIL PROTECTED]
