Good design, smart data access and optimizing the results of your web service are good way to improve performance of your web service. In an earlier post I also mentioned turning off XML schema validation. As it turn out, this may not be necessary.

A company called Stampede offers a solution for improving Web Service perfomance by offloading XML schema validation!!!

The product is actually much more comprehensive than that, read below a copy from an interesting piece of text from their website.

SOA Optimization Services

The Stampede Web 2.0 Performance Series also addresses the demands placed on the network and Web servers as a result of the proliferation of XML data and Service Oriented Architecture applications.  Stampede's client and appliance technology are now XML-aware, and add services specifically designed to optimize this environment.

• XML Document Differencing extends our Cache Differencing technology to only transmit the actual changes in the XML document; significantly reducing the data that is transmitted
  
• XML Schema Validation to validate the grammar of the XML message, and ensure the message does not contain unexpected or potentially malicious content
  
• XML Content Based Routing enables routing decisions to be made based on a dynamic analysis of the XML document

XML Threat Management Services

The transaction intensive demands of Web Services, AJAX and other XML applications require bullet-proof security.  XML applications are vulnerable to maliciously corrupted data, denial of service (DoS) attacks, and intrusion attempts.  The Stampede Web 2.0 Performance Series provides hardened security features to address these issues.

• XML Content Inspection uses parallel hardware to do symantec threat analysis on the entire XML message
• XML Well-formedness Checking protects the host environment against non-malicious message corruption
• XML Denial of Service (XDoS) Detection provides detection of specific XML parser attacks
• Message Anomaly Detection provides adjustable tolerance levels for recognition of message traffic patterns and identification of packet anomalies