IBM’s Kyle Brown starts hisnew comment by noticing that a lot people: "dig themselves into a hole by using Web services and XML in inappropriate ways". In his comment, Kyle describes three common pain points, explaining why they occur and providing some alternatives.
My message ate my server! Kyle notes that often web services developers start experiencing "out-of-memory" errors or strange "performance problems" often finding that the server has extremely high processing loads, with CPU utilization hovering close to 100% coupled with low throughput and high network latency. Typical cause for these symptoms are very large - sometimes 50 MB or more - messages. Moreover, these large messages often contain very large embedded binary information encoded using base-64 encoding as part of the main body of the XML message. This typically happens when a
...developer does not understand the limitations of the technology: XML processing is very useful for a lot of problems, but you have to realize that messages are parsed - and in most ... products, that means that much or all of the message will be held in memory.
