SOAP Serialization Performance Enhancement, Design And Implementation Of A Middleware

Abstract

The most straightforward way to improve performance of any system is to define the bottlenecks and think of ways to remove them. Web services are the inseparable part of any web application, as a result enhancing performance of web services will have a great effect on the overall performance of the system. The most widely used communication protocol in the web services model, SOAP, is a simple protocol for the exchange of messages. The serialization of large SOAP responses is a major performance bottleneck in a SOAP message exchange. Clearly, some web servers can expect to receive many similar messages for a particular web service as they share the same signature. The idea behind this paper is to avoid the redundant serialization stage of SOAP responses for request which have the same call parameters. The technique exploits the similarities between call parameters to improve web service Response Time by avoiding redundant serialization of the same response with the help of a middleware running on top of web server. The middleware will maintain a trie of incoming parameters for every set of current requests. This way request processing and serialization of the response of same requests will be done only once. In a nutshell, to serialize only the different responses is the simplest way to avoid extra work done by a serializer. It might worth noting that although our approach is to utilize the exact repeating portion parameters, the middleware can be configured to apply changes made to the result set of response to the serialized response being maintained in a trie to generate valid results.