Performance Trade-offs in Client-Side Service Delegation

Service Oriented Architecture, which builds on distributed computing platforms, is increasingly being adopted by organizations in both public and private sectors. Migration from traditional monolithic systems to services, in particular web services, characterizes much of systems evolution today. This paper analyzes some of the performance and modularization problems involved in current service-oriented computing. It investigates under which circumstances the communication between service providers and service consumers can be made more efficient by eliminating certain steps from traditional Remote Procedure Call (RPC) methods. After discussing traditional service invocation and its drawbacks, this paper proposes an alternative approach called Distributed Service Delegates (DSD). DSD is based on emphasizing client-side or local computations. An experiment is designed and implemented to measure the trade offs between traditional methods, in this case Web services, and the proposed DSD. The results of this experiment are discussed and its implications for future research are indicated. Accepted for publication in the Proceedings of the International Symposium on Web Systems Evolution (WSE), 2011, IEEE Computer Society.