Remote Object Activation is a concept in distributed computing that is used to increase performance. It enables the developer to specify which services should be "activated" or loaded into memory when the service engine is booted. It may be desirable to activate some services on-demand. Although this will increase the amount of time that it takes to run the operation the first time that it is called, after the first invocation, performance associated with operation execution should become inline with preloaded services.

The benefit of on-demand loading is to not pre-allocate resources that may never be utilized (memory, disk, etc.), thus allowing more resources for those services that are commonly used.

Remote Object Activation was considered out of scope in the SOAP specification. Although, SOAP Server vendors may choose proprietary means to implement this functionality. Remote Object Activation is a service design issue.