[Old Pedant]

Ummm...doesn't a web service use an ".aspx" file name extension?

That means that it *IS* a web page. It just happens to send its data in SOAP format, not in HTML format. So there's no real change in how the page is invoked vs. a standard ASP.NET page.

It is true that a web service typically doesn't need to establish a session, so there's a (relatively minor) savings there.

But I think if you benchmarked 100,000 web service requests and compare them to 100,000 standard ASP.NET requests and did it so that the only real difference in the two was how the data is returned (SOAP vs. HTML), you'd see only the most minor of performance differences. The real performance hit on the server will usually be the database request time, not the actual generation of SOAP vs. HTML. And here is where you *can* improve things, both for a web service and for a typical ASP.NET page: Try very hard to make only one connection per request. Try very hard to optimize the queries used as far as possible (usually means using Stored Procedures vs. ad hoc SQL queries). And so on.

It's been 10 years since I benchmarked web services, and I'm sure things have improved in that time, but when I did it back then there was no truly measurable performance advantage or disadvantage.