Performance: Remoting vs. Web Services

HTTP vs. TCP. Even though TCP squeezes out more throughput in extreme scenarios, it's hard to argue against the ubiquity of HTTP and port 80. It costs a little more, but you get proxies, compression, routing, and a lot more. Well worth it for the small cost.


Windows Service vs. IIS. Really the same argument as above. Like HTTP, IIS is such a well understood entity. It gives you a lot of free bonus functionality you wouldn't get in a vanilla service (think web farms for scalability). It's hard to justify not using it, given the minor performance hit.


Binary vs. SOAP. Binary is "poor man's compression". Plaintext/SOAP has the advantage of transparency, so if you can get a decent compression layer in there somewhere, you really don't need binary. I can't believe MS didn't include a compression layer in their remoting stack, so you might as well plan on using binary for now. This ties directly into the serialization time, which can be significant on large objects/datasets; the improvement in performance can be dramatic.


Remoting vs. Web Service. Where do I start? It depends how tightly coupled you want your application to be to your server-side API. Remoting is a little easier to get running with minimal work in the short term, but the long term benefits skew heavily towards Web Services. When you build a WS, you've built a truly generic HTTP interface layer that you can leverage for the forseeable future. This isn't a COM or CORBA flash in the pan.


http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000049.html