A Comparative Performance Evaluation of Different Implementations of the SOAP Protocol.

This paper presents a study evaluation of the SOAP [13] protocol performance between two different implementations: Java (Axis2) [2] and Erlang. This comparison has been carried out using several testbeds with input and output data of different sizes. More concretely, we developed three different web services representing typical scenarios likely to be found in real environments. The evaluation is two-fold: we measured both the number of requests per second answered (throughput) by each server and the response to a common server workload, mixing stress and stand-by phases. The Erlang [3] functional programming language claims to be specifically designed and suited for distributed, reliable and soft real-time concurrent systems. Moreover, its built-in lightweight process management and easiness of replication within distributed environments stand out Erlang as an appealing choice for service oriented architectures (SOAs) [7]. On the other hand, we compared this new approximation with the well-known Apache Axis2 project, as it is widely employed on the Web Services field by the Java community. This work allows us to conclude that the Erlang server is better when the computational cost of the web service is low, whereas the Axis2 server is more efficient as the service workload increases.