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Distributed computing using SOAP. What about speed ?

Thomas Weholt thomas at gatsoft.no
Wed Jul 25 10:21:31 EDT 2001 
hi,

( In relation to my previous post about user authentication using SOAP, I
got another simple question. )

Does anybody have any thoughts about SOAP, especially SOAPpy ( it looks very
nice, simple to use ), and potential speed issues? I'm thinking of
implementing a distributed system where nodes communicate using SOAP.
There's a clear potential of much traffic among the nodes and I just
wondered if SOAP is the right protocoll/technology for the job. In my
project each node will register with a nodemaster ( holds info about running
nodes, nothing else, will check for availability of registered nodes with a
given interval too, remove dead ones from list ) and get a list of running
nodes in return. It will then proceed to query these running nodes in a
serial manner ( at least to begin with, maybe use a async. approach later )
about information and parse the result.

Is SOAP suitable for something like this? It seems like it would be very
easy to get a system like this up and running. My goal is to make a
distributed system ala Gnutella, with no central server, just a bunch of
nodemasters and nodes. I'm interested in other users experience with SOAP,
with focus on speed of communcation ( speed of network disregarded. I'm only
interested in impact on speed caused by SOAP itself. ).

It's also clear that some problems might occur cuz the BaseHTTPServer which
is used for the most part, have performance issues. Perhaps implementing the
server using asyncchat etc. would increase performance ?? Why aren't the
modules allready implemented with these tools available in the standard
python lib allready, if that's the case?

Any ideas appreciated.

Thomas
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