What type of performance should I expect out of web services?

Question

What type of performance should I expect out of web services? I have an application that is averaging between 2 an 7 call per second on a simple GetServerTime() method. This method only returns a date from the server. I am using WCF and making the call over SSL. I know this question is really relative but I am just looking for some ballpark figures.

Answer 1

The answer is very much "it depends".

There are some real-world test results here that are based on a given CPU / Memory etc scenario:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms978411.aspx

It shows Binary TCP services to be more performant for Request Per Second but HTTP web services do well for Response Time vs User Load... I'll let you read and digest the full details.