Web Service Performance using SOAP Compression

Recent distributed computing applications are developed using different platforms working on different Operating Systems and these applications are running on heterogeneous hardware. SOAP protocol is mainly used for communicating among heterogeneous processes developed in platforms like .Net, Java, Android and so on. SOAP messages are basically XML documents and thus because of use of XML messages for interprocess communication there is a chance that performance of distributed computing applications will suffer. Client’s request and server’s response is sent in SOAP format and the size of SOAP message may be large if it is carrying information from databases. To transport such a large SOAP message more time will be required resulting in increase in response time and decrease in throughput. One solution is to use run time compression technique to compress SOAP message. Our experiments show that response time is reduced by 56% while using compression technique. Keywords-Compression, performance, SOAP, SOAP Extension, Web service