The present invention provides for a system and method of performing efficient XML-RPC. Generally, the system comprises a client which generates XML-RPC requests in a compression format which encodes tags, attributes and attribute values as tokens rather than strings and transmits the request to a server. The server gets the requests from the client, invokes the corresponding method and sends a response encoded in the same format that the clients request was encoded in. In a further aspect of the present invention, the client receives a URL of a valid XML-RPC server. The client establishes a persistent connection with the server via a request utilizing the URL. The method to be called utilizing XM-RPC is passed to the client along with the associated parameters. The client generates and XML-RPC request which is transmitted in an encoding format which represents at least a portion of the tags (and attributes and attribute values if present) as tokens rather than strings. The server receives the requests, and after being parsed receives the method to be called and the associated parameters. The server attempts to locate the method and handler in a hash table, and if available, calls the method. When the return parameters of the method are returned to the server, it encodes the parameters in a XML-RPC response according to the tokenized format, and sends the response back to the client. The response is then parsed and the client obtains the parameters, which it then utilizes as appropriate.