A Performance Comparison of Web Service Object Marshalling and Unmarshalling Solutions

The performance of web services depends to a great extent on the efficiency of data transfer and on a number of factors related to it. Such factors are the network's possible latency, the efficiency of the used data marshalling and unmarshalling scheme, and the resulting length of the chosen message wire format. Several object marshalling and unmarshalling schemes aimed for data transfer in the web service domain were tested. The chosen schemes relied on XML, JSON and other binary alternatives. The practical marshalling and unmarshalling performance was measured and calculated. The results were analysed as regards pure effective marshalling and unmarshalling throughput and also concerning the resulting overhead affecting the efficiency of network transmission. The results show not only the implications on the performance of the chosen marshalling scheme but also the effect of serialization method and format. It was also clearly demonstrated that JSON is not always the best choice over the traditional XML when aiming at a high performance web services.