WCF client application hang -- need repro advice

Question

I have a WCF application with a couple thousand clients connecting to a pair of services running under IIS. What I've noticed is that some of these clients get into a hung state, and I'm trying to reproduce this.

When this problem was first noticed, I had not modified the throttling configuration and the services were set to ConcurrencyMode.Single. One thing I noticed was that an IISReset on the server caused many clients to hang. Yet pulling this same stunt on the client running against IIS on my local machine doesn't seem to cause the problem.

I caught this only once in the wild, but didn't have debugging enabled at the time. The symptom I witnessed was that the client appeared to be trying to open a connection to the web server, but did not succeed. While monitoring with Fiddler, I saw no attempt to reach the service endpoint. Obviously that makes me suspect the client proxy.

I have a very solid hunch as to what's happening -- namely I've been using "Close()" instead of "Abort()" when the service throws an exception, which I believe is causing the channels to become corrupted. But considering the effort to get a new version out there, I need to reproduce this problem by causing a client on my own machine to hang before I can start making changes to the code.

Where should I start?

Thanks in advance,

roufamatic

Answer 1

Have you got any logging turned on? This could help in diagnosing the problem. It can be done completely in config, so no need to build a new version. Use the Service Configuration Editor tool to set it all up. The Visual Studio 2008 Training Kit has a good tutorial on how to use logging and the log viewer.

Answer 2

I suppose this was too vague a question though I was mostly curious what people might suggest. As it turns out there was a nontrivial difference between my workstation and a production environment that, once resolved, allowed me to see the problem. In this case, somehow using Fiddler to watch the traffic actually prevented the error from occurring! Now to ask another question.