Is 5MB of data in SOAP response accetable

[Joshua Antony]

Hi,

I am doing a Technical Design for a project, which interacts with webservice to fetch particular set of data. The problem here is that the maximum expected SOAP response size is 5MB. In order to simulate this behaviour, I created a Mock Service to return approx 5MB of data & tested the performance through SOAP-UI. However, to my surprise the SOAP-UI says that the response was 11MB! Just to make sure, I copied the response & saved as XML - validated the size , it was same 5MB. So, I started testing on different clients & I get inconsistent behaviour regarding the data returned and the performance by SOAP-UI. For the same 5MB of actual data, different SOAP-UI instances in different boxes have different response times (from 500ms - 5 sec) & different data size (5MB - 11MB). Thus, I assume that this is something to do with the network & hence the question -
What is the network overhead of sending 5MB of data as part of SOAP response? Will the response time be less than 1sec (assuming standard production app network configuration)?

Any inputs on this will be highly appreciated since its always better to find these gotchas before starting development :-)

Joshua

[Jayesh A Lalwani]

If the network is 10giga bit /sec, that roughly comes to 1gigabyte per second with overhead. So, 5mb should take about 1/200 of a second. IMO, network latency and server response time will be a bigger factor

[William Brogden]

No, 5mb inside a SOAP message is not acceptable, the reason being that a SOAP message gets parsed to an XML document - a DOM with an object for every element.

This is mind bogglingly slow plus uses lots of memory.

Large chunks of data should be handled as attachments - handy article in wikipedia on the api.

Bill

[Carles Gasques]

Hi,
could you use MTOM to optimize traversing part of this SOAP messages?