Optimizing Services

There are a number of different ways to call a Spectrum Technology Platform service and some of them perform better than others. The different ways of calling Spectrum Technology Platform services, in approximate order from fastest to slowest are:

Client API over SOCKET
Client API over HTTP
Client API over HTTPS
XML over HTTP
Web Services - SOAP and REST over HTTP

Invoking a service through the client API is generally faster than calling the web service. The network protocol can have a significant effect on the round-trip time for the service call. For example, using the persistent SOCKET connection instead of HTTP can improve response time by 30%-50%.

Performance in a real-time application calling Spectrum Technology Platform services also depends on whether the application is single-threaded or multithreaded, and whether the server has the resources available to fulfill the service request. For a single-threaded client application, specifying additional runtime instances of a stage will have minimal impact on response time. A multithreaded client application will generally benefit from multiple runtime instances, up to the number of concurrent threads.