Performance impact correlation of message size vs. concurrent users implementing web service security on Linux platform

Abstract

The implementation of web service security standards provides end-to-end security attaching signature and encryption headers to SOAP messages, but it outcomes with message overhead, as well as requires complex cryptographic operations for each message or some parts of it. This leads to extra CPU time and memory for processing information related to WS-Security, as well as elapsed time for parsing the increased XML message. This paper describes a series of experiments focused on understanding the performance impact of different security-level mechanisms based on WS-Security. We create a baseline of performance data that can be used to explore if the parameter "message size" or "number of concurrent messages" impacts more to the server performance for different message types with or without different WS-security mechanisms implemented on web service hosted on web server on Linux platform. Also, we analyze the correlation between these two parameters. © 2012 Springer-Verlag GmbH.