Should we use web service lists.asmx over CAML when working with large lists

Question

There is a list that has around 100k items in a SharePoint Site Collection. This site has been customized to serve certain business requirements through visual webparts.

While, regular CRUD (create,update,delete) operations are done through CAML , I was recommended to use lists.asmx web service based operations in the visual webpart to achieve significant performance improvement over CAML.

I googled a little over this, but wasn't able substantiate this recommendation. Kindly point me in the right direction here.

Answer 1

There is absolutely no performanve improvement by using the lists.asmx web service over using CAML directly.

lists.asmx is just receiving your CAML passing it on to the SharePoint object model, format the result as XML.

Sending request/response over the network (even internal on the server) and formatting SOAP messages isn't going to speed up things when there is no other differences.