Performance Evaluation for SOAP and RFC in SAP Netweaver Platform

SAP Netweaver Application Server (AS) provides two communication protocols to connect SAP ABAP (Advanced Business Application Programming) systems with external systems: Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) and Remote Function Call (RFC). RFC is the standard SAP interface for communication between SAP systems. SOAP is widely used in web service solutions for its nature cross-platform characteristic. It uses platform independent eXtensible Markup Language (XML) but it introduces more latency tags to represent the data. Thus, SOAP might need more memory and transferring time. This paper studies and compares their performance characteristic with introducing an evaluation model and then evaluates them for different use cases. This work gives a practical conclusion for protocol selection in special case.

[1]  Sasu Tarkoma,et al.  Comparing SOAP Performance for Various Encodings, Protocols, and Connections , 2003, PWC.

[2]  Bo Yan,et al.  Evaluation and Modeling of Web Services Performance , 2006, 2006 IEEE International Conference on Web Services (ICWS'06).

[3]  Robert A. van Engelen,et al.  Pushing the SOAP Envelope with Web Services for Scientific Computing , 2003, ICWS.

[4]  Manish Parashar,et al.  Latency Performance of SOAP Implementations , 2002, 2nd IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Cluster Computing and the Grid (CCGRID'02).

[5]  Madhusudhan Govindaraju,et al.  Investigating the limits of SOAP performance for scientific computing , 2002, Proceedings 11th IEEE International Symposium on High Performance Distributed Computing.

[6]  Yan Huang,et al.  A performance evaluation of using SOAP with attachments for e-Science , 2005 .