Are web services too slow?

David Gristwood s Blog Are web services too slow | Wood TV Stand

David Gristwood s Blog Are web services too slow | Wood TV Stand — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 03:36:56 GMT

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So, should you use web services in your own applications?

David Gristwood's WebLog — Wed, 23 Mar 2005 16:26:00 GMT

re: Are web services too slow?

ksuh — Fri, 22 Oct 2004 23:43:00 GMT

Obviously, network latency can be an issue with WS. HTTP compression helps a lot with this issue.

We're all using HTTP compression with WS? Right? Right?

re: Are web services too slow?

DrPizza — Fri, 22 Oct 2004 21:50:00 GMT

Web services are surely somewhat limited in terms of "scalability". COM is quite clever; I can make in-process calls, same-machine different process calls, and different machine, different process calls, and I don't have to care *too* much about it. Remote calls just have higher latency.

As such, in spite of COM being a "lower-level" protocol (describing, as it does, things like v-table layouts and so on), it offers, thanks to DCOM, in some sense a higher level of abstraction.

I personally like location transparency, though I know some don't. Web services--by concentrating so much on transport issue--seem to deny me that possibility.

re: Are web services too slow?

Jeff Parker — Fri, 22 Oct 2004 21:12:00 GMT

Hmm, interesting, could you maybe elaborate on this some, Why are people thinking they are to slow? What are these problems people are complaining about?

I have heard this before, people say oh no use remoting, speed, speed, speed.

However, I got to tell you I have been using Web services here at a fortune 500 global company, I can push and pull data all over the world faster than most people can blink. I have a web service in Belgium. Yeah, it was slow, it was integrating with a legacy Progress Database, it was the database that was slow. I put in caching of the data noticable speed jump and now no user complains about speed.

Scalable, this one web service went from being local Belgium only, to All Europe Locations, To All US location, with our US location going Ohh I want that here. To now opened up to our Customers. Web services to me are a godsend. Ok I am not moving megs of data per method call, only 10kb up to maybe 500 kb a method call but sometimes hundreds of calls per minute but that is the intention, maybe it is just me, but there are things like paging data, and so on. I guess I am not seeing what all these performance problems are that I keep hearing so much about, you might have a SQL server directly attached to an application making queries, are you really going to be returning megs of rows per query at a time or are you going to page it, why not same thing with web services?

So anyway can you please explain to me why people think this performance is an issue? Why is this an issue, what are people trying to do with this data? Yes if you put in timers they are slower, but slower is a relative term, we are talking a hundred or so milliseconds to get data from belgium to the US not seconds from at least from my experimentation. Oh, and our China and Korean location getting data back to the US is faster, but they have better bigger pipes back here.