Web Services vs REST - speed advantage

HFCDev

I'm thinking I'll probably need to run an end to end test to get an answer to this, but I'm at a different job site today where I don't have access to those tools.  have others out there noticed an appreciable difference in speed between Web Services and REST API calls?  My guess is that for extremely large files, you'd get a similar performance out of both. Overall though, I suspect that WS has more overhead due to the size of the SOAP packets versus a JSON message with REST but wanted to make sure I wasn't missing something.  For the client that needs it, network latency is a huge problem so anything I can do to cut down on the number of bytes transferred per transaction will be helpful.  If network overhead is not a factor, what will drive the decision will be whether all the calls they would want to make are in one or the other.  

Cheers

-Hugh Ferguson

HFCDev

I did some experiments with two Java projects - one a connector using REST API and the other using the WS API.  For a group of files, I performed an upload, a download, then a delete with both APIs.  What I noticed was that for smaller files, the WS API ran slightly faster but for larger files, I seemed to get slightly better performance with the REST API.  In both cases, I was connecting to Apache Tomcat.  For some reason, I was expecting the WS API to be more performant for larger files, but it could be that using the Content Handler servlet where you are managing the chunking of files is not as efficient as having something like the Apache Commons HTTP library manage it for you.  So, I'm not yet ready to declare a winner.  I'm curious if anyone else has done any sort of comparison between the two.

-Hugh