SOAP, a simple, robust, and extensible protocol for the exchange of messages, is the most widely used communication protocol in the Web services model. SOAPs XML-based message format hinders its performance, thus making it unsuitable in high-performance scientific applications. The deserialization of SOAP messages, which includes processing of XML data and conversion of strings to in-memory data types, is the major performance bottleneck in a SOAP message exchange. This paper presents and evaluates a new optimization technique for removing this bottleneck. This technique, called differential deserialization (DDS), exploits the similarities between incoming messages to reduce deserialization time. Differential deserialization is fully SOAPcompliant and requires no changes to a SOAP client. A performance study demonstrates that DDS can result in a significant performance improvement for some Web services.
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