Hi all,

We're currently looking into doing some performance tweaking on a website which relies heavily on a Soap webservice. But ... our servers are located in Belgium and the webservice we connect to is locate in San Francisco so it's a long distance connection to say the least.

Our website is PHP powered, using PHP's built in SoapClient class. On average a call to the webservice takes 0.7 seconds and we are doing about 3-5 requests per page. All possible request/response caching is already implemented so we are now looking at other ways to improved the connection speed.

This is the code which instantiates the SoapClient, what i'm looking for now is other ways/methods to improve speed on single requestes. Anyone has idea's or suggestions?

private function _createClient()
{
    try {

        $wsdl = sprintf($this->config->wsUrl.'?wsdl', $this->wsdl);
        $client = new SoapClient($wsdl, array(
            'soap_version'       => SOAP_1_1,
            'encoding'           => 'utf-8',
            'connection_timeout' => 5,
            'cache_wsdl'         => 1,
            'trace'              => 1,
            'features'           => SOAP_SINGLE_ELEMENT_ARRAYS
        ));

        $header_tags = array('username' => new SOAPVar($this->config->wsUsername, XSD_STRING, null, null, null, $this->ns),
                             'password' => new SOAPVar(md5($this->config->wsPassword), XSD_STRING, null, null, null, $this->ns));
        $header_body = new SOAPVar($header_tags, SOAP_ENC_OBJECT);
        $header = new SOAPHeader($this->ns, 'AuthHeaderElement', $header_body);

        $client->__setSoapHeaders($header);

    } catch (SoapFault $e){
        controller('Error')->error($id.': Webservice connection error '.$e->getCode());
        exit;
    }

    $this->client = $client;
    return $this->client;
}