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Re: Interesting XML-DIST-APP thread

• To: xml-dev@l...
• Subject: Re: Interesting XML-DIST-APP thread
• From: Gavin Thomas Nicol <gtn@r...>
• Date: Tue, 8 Jan 2002 23:11:13 -0500
• In-reply-to: <B7C92VOJ3XLH1UC993BGBDCAMJZUVS.3c3b9698@MChamp>
• Organization: Red Bridge Interactive, Inc.
• References: <B7C92VOJ3XLH1UC993BGBDCAMJZUVS.3c3b9698@MChamp>

Dave Winer says this on the dist-app list:
>To form an opinion on this you'd have to have an application in mind and
>then do some performance comparisons under realistic loads. My intuition
>says it doesn't matter much how fat XML is for protocols -- the Internet and
>LANs have scaled to push around lots of images and MP3s, which are huge
>compared to SOAP or XML-RPC messages. 

This is actually wrong, though intuitively you'd believe it to be so. The way 
TCP/IP generally works, large files tend to get transferred fairly 
efficiently, as do small RPC calls.... and smallish things tend to get 
penalized.

In order to make a fair comparison, you have to compare the cost of making an 
RPC call, say a function that takes 2 strings/integers and computes a result. 
There is a penalty here for even increasing the overall message size by one 
or two packets.

When I did my tests a few years ago, I found RMI to be slower than hand-coded 
XML-RPC calls... apparently because JAVA serialization was slow. However, 
XML-RPC was, in general *much* slower than hand-coded RPC.

Despite speed there are the obvious network management issues of resource 
planning etc. 

Anyway, this isn't a flame against SOAP per se., so much as a note that it 
isn't anywhere nearly as simple as people might think.

• References:
  • Interesting XML-DIST-APP thread
    • From: Mike Champion <mc@x...>

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