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The performance of SOAP requests varies depending on the SOAP implementation
you use. The factor that has the most impact on SOAP performance is XML
parsing. There are three common ways to parse XML: DOM, SAX, and pull
parsing. DOM is extremely resource-intensive and performance gets
significantly worse as the size of the message gets larger. SAX is quite a
bit faster than DOM. Pull parsing is the fastest, assuming that you have a
priori knowledge of the schema of the message (i.e., a WSDL description).
The other key factor that can affect SOAP performance is resource
management. I can't speak for the other SOAP implementors, but at Systinet
we've focused a lot of attention on performance, and the next release of
WASP for Java (beta release scheduled to go out later this month) now runs
faster than RMI, which makes it pretty comparable to ODBC performance.
This was first published in May 2002
