>How large of a SOAP message can you send before it doesn't make sense to >send the data in a SOAP message?
I'd like to ask a related question: how big a request or response can Axis efficiently handle? We had some discussion a week ago about this and some concern was expressed that Axis was buffering a lot in memory. I did some quick experiments with an rpc/encoded SOAP call that returned an array of objects. Each object has a smattering of data: a string, a few numbers. What I found was that Axis could handle 10,000 objects in the response reasonably but not 100,000 objects. The client was the bottleneck. I also saw evidence of some O(n^2) scaling in the size of the array. Each element in my test array has 40 bytes of real data in ASCII. The XML encoding ballooned it out to 500 bytes. So 100,000 elements is 50 megs of message. It took the client over 15 minutes to parse this! Things get a whole lot better if you turn off multi-ref and typing in the response message: <parameter name="sendMultiRefs" value="false"/> <parameter name="sendXsiTypes" value="false"/> My test went from over 15 minutes to parse the response to under a minute. So that's my understanding of Axis message size limitations. I'd love to hear from others about their experiences, particularly when compared to other SOAP implementations.
