Exploiting Request Characteristics to Improve Performance of Web Services Based Business Applications

Web Services and workflow have been widely adopted in building complicated business systems. In these systems, high security concern is claimed. But frequent authentication and computing-intensive encoding and decoding operation bring extra workload to the systems and greatly impact the performance of Web Services and workflow engine, especially under heavy load. In this paper, we propose Requests Automated Binding Mechanism, RABM, to automatically pack the requests from multiple clients but to a common target service in a short time period into one SOAP message, then sent by the workflow engine at runtime. Extra security operation costs are reduced without modifying of application programs. We use the Travel Service provided by W3C to evaluate RABM. As the experiment result shows, we can achieve up to 130% improvement of throughput and lower the average response time to 41%1.