WCF Timeout Returning Five-Dimensional Array of String

Question

Hi,

I wrote a WCF service that returns a string[][][][][] (necessary for legacy reasons).

Then I noticed an important fact: if the service manipulates N objects the answer is returned immediately (in localhost) but if it tries to manipulate N+1 objects a timeout occurs (I set it to 30sec).

The problem occurs if the string[20][20][20][5][20] becomes a string[20][20][20][6][20].

Why it takes so much if I add 1 object? The code of the service is not useful so I'll not include it.

Thanks,

Alberto

Answer 1

Define adding of one object. Give us some source code. Adding item to array, means changing its size and moving items around, which in your case can be very expensive - you have a 5 dimensional array! Why is that?

Update:

I would guess that the original array has less strings in it and more nulls, where the second one where your bottleneck is have more strings.

Answer 2

IMHO, if you are using a string[][][][][], there is something wrong in your design.

Answer 3

check to see if the datacontract seriializer is set to max objects in graph.sometimes the default which is set to a low value can cause this to happen. We had a similar problem when 1000 things returned from WCF to populate a dropdown failed just becaise of this.

<behaviors>
    <behavior name="CalculatorServiceBehavior">
        <dataContractSerializer maxItemsInObjectGraph="6553600" />
    </behavior>
</behaviors>

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Answer 4

The problem was the maxReceivedMessageSize, a parameter that indicates the higher amount of message exchanged.

Setting it to 6291456 the service worked well.

Alberto