Tim Pokorny has written about some of his XFire performance testing recently. For those of you who are having performance problems with your current SOAP stack you may be interested in some of the numbers. To summarize some of the results:
- 80+ requests and responses per second with 4K response messages.
- CPU utilization was never over 75% on the client side and never over 50% on the server side (XFire)
- While an official comparison to Axis was never made, he said Axis was never able to push over 8 messages/second.
A lot of times performance numbers can be abstract and unrelated to real world scenarios. So it is good to hear this:
The tests used a legacy simulation from DSTO [the Australian Defense Science and Technology Organization] that the labs just finished creating a suite of specialised web-service clients for, so this was what you would term a "real world test".
My benchmarking also confirms his numbers. Tim doesn't mention latency, but it can become a huge factor when building web services. In my tests I noticed up to 1/2-1/6 the latency of Axis.
We're looking forward to Tim's further analysis (and pretty graphs!) of his benchmarks. I will be posting some of my own more in depth benchmarks results soon as well!