[MOBY-dev] surprising results with speed tests:

[Ken Steube]

That's great info Mark.

I don't know how the two XML parsers work, do you know if either of
them does the meat of the parsing in C instead of perl?

I bet you could test the speed of XML parsing before recoding MOBY.
Write a little subroutine to parse a typical SOAP message using one of
the XML parsers and loop over it a hundred times to see the average
time.

Ken

On 29 Jul 2003, Mark Wilkinson wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> I've been worried about speed issues for a while, and I finally put my
> mind to testing how much of a speed hit we are taking by using SOAP.
> MOBY Central is surprisingly slow - about one query per second.  I had
> assumed that this might be due to the overhead of using SOAP::Lite, but
> had no evidence of this.
>
> MOBY Central doesn't need a SOAP connection... in fact, nothing we do in
> this project now depends on SOAP, except by convention.  (historically,
> in the earlier prototype I was using more SOAPy functionality, but that
> has gradually been whittled away until we now no longer have an absolute
> requirement to use SOAP *at all*).  To see if using SOAP was actually
> becoming a burden, this morning I coded an interface to MOBY Central
> that used straightforward CGI GET to make the procedure calls.  What
> surprised me was how little difference it made to the speed of the
> calls!
>
> I ran the testMOBYClientCentral script a few times alternately using the
> SOAP and the GET interfaces.  I had full control over everything on the
> server because I was running it on my laptop computer without the
> network card inserted; the only thing "running" on the machine was the
> test script.  The results were:
>
> soap 13.72
> cgi 12.56
>
> soap 13.73
> cgi 12.37
>
> soap 13.67
> cgi 12.38
>
> soap 13.65
> cgi 12.37
>
> So apparently we are only taking a 10% speed hit by using SOAP!  I was
> stunned at how little overhead it was producing!
>
> So... the speed problem might be coming from the internal XML parser
> used by MOBY Central itself.  Over the next couple of weeks I will try
> to move MOBY::Central and MOBY::Client::Central over to using
> XML::libXML rather than XML::DOM.  Apparently the underlying library is
> faster for LibXML.  I'll test it again after that and post the results
> to this list.  If at that time the speed hit is proportionately more for
> SOAP, I think we should reconsider whether we need to be using it or
> not.
>
> Cheers!
>
> M
>
>
>

-- 
-------------------------------------
Ken Steube            steube at sdsc.edu
San Diego Supercomputer Center @ UCSD
San Diego, California             USA