Migrating to Web services: a performance engineering approach

In this paper we look at several performance pitfalls that Web services are facing today and at the performance penalties that have to be paid when exposing a legacy application as a Web service. We investigate two performance metrics of Web services, latency and scalability, and compare them with those of legacy middleware. The goal of the paper is to show how the performance penalties can be mitigated by following the principles and methods of performance engineering. Performance models can help the migration decisions, especially when new architectures or new deployment topologies are sought. The paper shows the mechanisms of building and solving a performance model involving Web services. An example is presented throughout the paper. Copyright (C) 2004 John Wiley Sons, Ltd.