Distributed computing using SOAP. What about speed ?

[Skip Montanaro]

    Martin> "Thomas Weholt" <thomas at gatsoft.no> writes:
    >> Does anybody have any thoughts about SOAP, especially SOAPpy ( it
    >> looks very nice, simple to use ), and potential speed issues?

    Martin> If speed is an issue, I would recommend against SOAP. If you use
    Martin> CORBA, you can get very efficient implementations. Even the
    Martin> least efficient ones (e.g. Fnorb) will easily out-pace SOAP any
    Martin> time.

Perhaps, but it all depends on what and how you sling your data around.
Clearly, you can't efficiently pass and receive multi-megabyte data
structures, but that would hold true for any distributed communication
protocol.  A megabyte of data is still a megabyte of data.  I tweaked
xmlrpclib a year or two ago to handle gzip encoding.  It compresses the xml
on the wire quite nicely.  Doesn't have much effect when talking over a LAN
but over the Internet it's quite nice to have.  I suspect it wouldn't be too
hard to add gzip encoding support to SOAPpy either.

-- 
Skip Montanaro (skip at pobox.com)
http://www.mojam.com/
http://www.musi-cal.com/