An Investigation of Software Bloat in Web Services

Abstract

Web services has established a significant landmark in the field of distributed com- puting. But its performance over the benefits such as interoperability, modularity was questioned all the time. Due to the added extra layers to facilitate interop- erability and modularity contributes heavily to the runtime bloat under different forms, such as excess function calls, generation of excess objects and creation of excessively large data structures. Hence also contributes to more CPU cycles. Our research goes beyond just measuring performance of web services, but more focuses on measuring execution bloat associated with web service in terms of en- ergy, memory bloat based on heap memory usage, code bloat in terms of lines of code executed and build a comparison using other standard ways of communica- tion like through RPC. Our findings reveal an extra 1.394 kJ energy dissipates in each request due to the overhead added by SOAP processing, mostly due to the cost of XML serialization and de-serialization.