I don't know exactly what you're passing , so I can't help you too much in a specific module that might suit your needs -- but my benchmarks with SOAP::Lite and the data I passed suggested the majority of the time was spent in serializing/deserializing the data.

I replaced the serializer and deserializer, so that it didn't do nearly as much inspection of the values in trying to guess what the variable types were. It's possible that a document/literal serializer might be viable, as we could remove all of the inspection on serialization, but I haven't had a chance to test it.

We're also looking at alternate formats for data encoding, as we have a whole lot of small fields, and the XML format accounts for the majority of the message (and still would, even if we switched to doc/lit).

Although REST has been mentioned -- I'm reluctant to suggest that path without knowing what you're passing. It's fine for making data available, but I'm working on search engines, and I haven't found a good way to define the search parameters in a manner that works for us. (if someone knows of good examples of REST being used for seaches w/ over a dozen independant paramters (that might change in the future), please let me know, as I'd love to see how other people are dealing with the problem).

Other things to try to speed up your access -- (note: I haven't tried either, so I don't know how much they'll help) -- try accessing the service via a WSDL, as it should change how serialization is handled. Or try specifying the type of each item using SOAP::Data objects ... it may speed up serialization at the very least.