LG,
Thanks for your response. I think that helps my analysis of the issue some. If the message buffer increases only as needed, it sounds like a 10KB message would only have to utilize that much memory to send the message, instead of allocating the entire 100MB for only 10KB in size.
As far as the speed of processing for a large file, luckily that isn't going to be an issue. The request/response flows that could have a large amount of XML records in the response aren't required to happen at a certain rate. So if it takes a little longer to process a single 50MB response as opposed to 50 separate 1MB response...shouldn't be an issue.
Thanks again for your quick answer!