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Is SOAP Slow? Who cares?

Stefan Tilkov,

There’s a fascinating thread, without any chance of a conclusion, going on regarding SOAP performance:Jim Webber initially commented on some statements on the ZeroC web site regarding SOAP’s bad performance. Marc Laukien and Michi Henning followed up, and Jim responded again — the argument centering around whether or not the speed of light is a limiting factor.

My personal take is that of course message processing speed matters — sometimes. When it does, as in the online gaming example, using SOAP is probably a totally dumb idea. In a large number of use cases (I don’t know whether it’s 90% or 70%, but definitely significant), you have to worry much more about the time needed to process the business logic or get data from your DB - which means that the performance advantage of something like ICE, which is probably insanely great, simply doesn’t matter.