[MOBY-dev] surprising results with speed tests:

Martin Senger senger at ebi.ac.uk
Tue Jul 29 18:02:07 UTC 2003


Just my 2 cents: "Speed is good but standards are better."
In more details: if you remove SOAP, you remove interoperability
(languages etc.). I am not saying that SOAP is ideal, but at least it is a
standard approach in the distributed architecture.

However, my barking is useless now because of your tests resulting with
a hypothesis that SOAP is not the main culprit. Which makes me happy :-)

But, the SOAP layer may be still optimalized. For example, you may
consider to sending parameters of the Moby Central methods as base64 data
instead of strings.

Regarding using a different XML parser it can be also optimalized using
SOAP::Constants::DO_NOT_USE_XML_PARSER (see details in the SOAP::Lite
docs). Also, even if you start to use a different XML parser, the
SOAP::Lite will not - and will be still slow because of limitations in the
underlying James Clark's expat parser. Again here the main (and from my
experiences with the medline citations significant) improvement can be
achieved by using base64 for passing XML fragments.

   Cheers,
   Martin

-- 
Martin Senger

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