Originally posted by James Clark:
How many transactions per second is required? Is 15 per second acceptable?
Explain what you mean by "the Web Service provider is a dummy one".
Is the web service call synchronous or asynchronous?
In general, with XML-based web services, there is significant overhead stemming from processing the XML-based data, e.g. parsing, unmarshalling, etc.
In a clustered environment, hundreds of transactions per second will be required, so the solution has to be scalable.
By 'dummy' I mean that the web service provider simply returns a hard coded response rather than doing any CPU/IO intensive operation, so that it unlikely to be holding things up. Stub may be a better description.
The web service call is synchronous.
"In general, with XML-based web services, there is significant overhead stemming from processing the XML-based data, e.g. parsing, unmarshalling, etc."
If the parsing, unmarshalling etc is the problem then putting the app on more CPUs should solve the problem, and that is likely to be my next stop.