Disclosed are methods and threads for responding to a request to perform an operation on a server object as may be provided in software form within an object request broker (ORB) server library or an ORB server. The specified object is identified by a marshaled object key in a conventional manner. The method improves upon prior art techniques by directly locating the object using the marshaled object key free of any unmarshaling step. The specified operation can then be invoked on the located object. The method applies to both in-process and out-of-process requests. In a preferred implementation, the marshaled object key is utilized as a hash key to directly access a pointer to the object.