Improving the performance of your Web services

With the widespread proliferation of Web services, quality of service (QoS) will become a significant factor in distinguishing the success of service providers. QoS determines the service usability and utility, both of which influence the popularity of the service. In this article, we look at the various Web service QoS requirements, bottlenecks affecting performance of Web services, approaches of providing service quality, transactional services, and a simple method of measuring response time of your Web services using the service proxy.

The dynamic e-business vision calls for a seamless integration of business processes, applications, and Web services over the Internet. Delivering QoS on the Internet is a critical and significant challenge because of its dynamic and unpredictable nature. Applications with very different characteristics and requirements compete for scarce network resources. Changes in traffic patterns, denial-of-service attacks and the effects of infrastructure failures, low performance of Web protocols, and security issues over the Web create a need for Internet QoS standards. Often, unresolved QoS issues cause critical transactional applications to suffer from unacceptable levels of performance degradation.

With standards like SOAP, UDDI, and WSDL being adopted by all major Web service players, a whole range of Web services -- covering the financial services, high-tech, and media and entertainment -- are being currently developed. As most of the Web services are going to need to establish and adhere to standards, QoS will become an important selling and differentiating point of these services.

QoS covers a whole range of techniques that match the needs of service requestors with those of the service provider's based on the network resources available. By QoS, we refer to non-functional properties of Web services such as performance, reliability, availability, and security.