Editing WS-Security (section)

==Performance==
WS-Security adds significant overhead to SOAP processing due to the increased size of the message on the wire, XML and cryptographic processing, requiring faster CPUs and more memory and bandwidth.

An evaluation in 2005<ref name="Lui">{{Cite web |url=http://grids.ucs.indiana.edu/ptliupages/publications/WSSPerf.pdf |title=Hongbin Liu, Shrideep Pallickara, Geoffrey Fox: Performance of Web Services Security |access-date=12 January 2010 |archive-date=24 February 2021 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20210224140108/http://grids.ucs.indiana.edu/ptliupages/publications/WSSPerf.pdf |url-status=dead }}</ref> measured 25 types of SOAP messages of different size and complexity processed by WSS4J with both WS-Security and WS-SecureConversation on a Pentium 4/2.8&nbsp;GHz CPU.
Some findings were:
* Encryption was faster than signing.
* Encryption and signing together were 2–7 times slower than signing alone and produced significantly bigger documents.
* Depending on the type of message, WS-SecureConversation either made no difference or reduced processing time by half in the best case.
* It took less than 10 milliseconds to sign or encrypt up to an array of 100 kilobytes, but it took about 100~200 to perform the security operations for SOAP.

Another benchmark in 2006<ref>[http://francoislascelles.sys-con.com/node/204424/ Francois Lascelles, Aaron Flint: WS Security Performance. Secure Conversation versus the X509 Profile]</ref> resulted in this comparison:
{| class="wikitable"
|-
! Security mechanism
! Messages/second
|-
| WS-Security (X.509) XML Signature & Encryption
| 352
|-
| WS-SecureConversation XML Signature & Encryption
| 798
|-
| Transport Layer Security
| 2918
|-
|}