Distributed computing using SOAP. What about speed ?

[Skip Montanaro]

    Martin> My concern is rather with communicating many small requests,
    Martin> rather than few large ones; in my experience, small requests is
    Martin> the common case. Here, the overhead of an XML parser, plus the
    Martin> navigation through the XML document, cost way more than the
    Martin> CORBA marshalling/unmarshalling. Also, CORBA tends to produce
    Martin> smaller requests on the wire to represent the same data, to a
    Martin> degree that not even compression of a SOAP request helps.

Yes, that can be a problem.  With SOAP you can mitigate some of it (I think)
by using HTTP 1.1 and saving the cost of making and breaking repeated
connections in some instances.  There's not much to be done to get around
the XML parsing cost except try and find faster XML parsers.  I use XML-RPC
w/sgmlop.  In my application domain XML parsing is the least of my
performance worries. ;-)

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