web services performance question

[Kishore Dandu]

how is the performance of webservice(if I am using a app server like weblogic) if it is synchronous communication.

I am expecting about 150000 hits per day.
I will reply to client with a XML(that is reply for the request).
Reply usually takes about 5-7 seconds for processing.
Client will wait for the request.

Does number of tcp connections allowed by app server have any effect on the performance of the service.

[Lasse Koskela]

According to my math, 150000 hits per day translates roughly to 2 hits per second. That would mean that while one request is waiting for its response, there's approximately 12 requests coming in, i.e. less than 15 TCP connections simultaneously open. If the load is even, you should have no problems with the default configurations of any application server.

[Kishore Dandu]

If the party I am servicing is single(and is known) would u prefer a Web-service or a urlconnection(or httpclient for that matter).

BTW about 80% of 150000 hits may happen in peak period of 10 hours.
[ September 30, 2004: Message edited by: Kishore Dandu ]

[William Brogden]

Well, a web service is going to use a URLConnection anyway so that is not an issue. Seems to me the question of performance revolves around how complex that XML request is in terms of CPU time to parse, compared with other time consuming processes in the application.
A 5-7 second processing time sounds to me like the XML parsing time is insignificant compared to the other operations. If that is some sort of database operation, that is where you should be looking for optimization.
Bill

[Bruno Collet]

If you remove the time that the web server takes for processing HTTP requests (which would be the same for an ordinary web application), and the time for performing business logic, then the time that depends on the web services layer includes only marshalling to and unmarshalling from XML documents.
To reduce this XML<->Java time, you have to make sure that marshall/unmarshall is straightforward. One way of doing this is to generate your java classes, complete with marshall/unmarshall code, from your XML schemas. Tools like Castor XML do this. From my humble experience, this XML<->Java transformation takes a few milliseconds for a single request of a few KB on an ordinary desktop computer.