Can XML-RPC performance be improved?

[Diez B. Roggisch]

> Beware, CORBA marshaling/unmarshaling can be similarly deadly, especially if
> you are passing Any's and have to marshal complex type codes.  But if you
> are just sending arrays of octets, or strings of chars, then CORBA
> marshal/unmarshal will be quite fast.

Sure, any is no good at all. But I guess having a well-defined struct 
makes send corba the data comparably packed and (give or take endianess) 
directly in a representation close to what the result will look like. In 
contrast to XML, that wraps _everything_ in a plethora of bytes just for 
  the fun of it...


> Of course, something will have to convert that array to meaningful data
> *somewhere*!  You can't really eliminate software complexity, you can only
> move it around.  (not original, I'm quoting Chris Stone, founder of the OMG.
> Also from Chris Stone - "I finally came up with a good definition for
> middleware.  Middleware is the software nobody wants to pay for.")

Also true - but you can make the matter of reinterpreting a bunch of 
bytes a mere cast (TCP/IP solution) or invoke a few thousand lines of 
code called XML-Parser. And on top of _that_ the XMLRPC itself. CORBA is 
certainly between these two, but on a scale of 5-20 times faster. Which 
might be the difference between a loaded but responsive server and a 
self-inflicted DDOS :)

Diez