Transmitting the least amount of data over the wire with WCF

Question

My project has a netTCP WCF service. This is the app.config for it:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<configuration>
    <system.serviceModel>
        <bindings>
            <netTcpBinding>
                <binding name="NetTcpBinding_IIndexer" closeTimeout="00:01:00"
                    openTimeout="00:01:00" receiveTimeout="00:10:00" sendTimeout="00:01:00"
                    transactionFlow="false" transferMode="Buffered" transactionProtocol="OleTransactions"
                    hostNameComparisonMode="StrongWildcard" listenBacklog="10"
                    maxBufferPoolSize="524288" maxBufferSize="65536" maxConnections="10"
                    maxReceivedMessageSize="65536">
                    <readerQuotas maxDepth="32" maxStringContentLength="8192" maxArrayLength="16384"
                        maxBytesPerRead="4096" maxNameTableCharCount="16384" />
                    <reliableSession ordered="true" inactivityTimeout="00:10:00"
                        enabled="false" />
                    <security mode="None">
                        <transport clientCredentialType="Windows" protectionLevel="EncryptAndSign" />
                        <message clientCredentialType="Windows" />
                    </security>
                </binding>
            </netTcpBinding>
        </bindings>
        <client>
            <endpoint address="net.tcp://mach1:9000/Indexer" binding="netTcpBinding"
                bindingConfiguration="NetTcpBinding_IIndexer" contract="in.IIndexer"
                name="NetTcpBinding_IIndexer" />
        </client>
    </system.serviceModel>
</configuration>

Is there any thing that can be done to maximize the compression of the data being sent over the wire? My project is internal so speed and processing power are essentially of no issue.

What are some good tips and tricks to compress the data sent from the client to the WCF service?

Answer 1

It depends upon the sort of data that you're sending, but if you're using serialization to create the data, then serializing to XML and compressing that with a GZipStream can result in fewer bytes than compressing the data generated by a binary serialization.

Answer 2

I'm still trying to piece all of this together myself, but I do know that when you use the DataContractAttribute, you are using DataContract serialization. I'm not clear exactly on the differences between this serialization scheme and the Serializable scheme, but from what I've been able to gather, they are different.

Marc Gravell, one of the moderators here at SO, is the expert that I've looked to on this issue. He actually has a serialization scheme called protobuf-net that is available for use here.

Answer 3

The message encoding specified by the binding will determine how your data gets turned into bytes on the wire. For the NetTcpBinding, it will automatically use binary encoding which gives you the most compact representation of your message out of all the built-in WCF encoders.

For more information, I would recommend these resources:

1. Zulfiqar Ahmed: SOAP message size optimization: Encoding vs compression
2. Kenny Wolf: Performance Characteristics of WCF Encoders
3. MSDN: Choosing a Message Encoder