How do you obtain WCF performance metrics?

Question

WCF is a general communication framework and the more you use it, the more knobs you find there are to tune (endpoint, security, serialization, etc). I have an application that is sensitive to a number of QoS attributes and I'd like to begin tweaking the settings to understand how each impacts bandwidth, latency and scalability of this WCF-based application.

As far as I can see, there is no general entry point to collect the following metrics, but I'm hoping we can come up with a list of technique for gathering them:

• Number of calls
• Round trip time of call
• Bandwidth utilization
• Serialized size of requests and responses

FWIW, I don't mind capturing these metrics as long as there are reasonable entry points where I can insert hooks (even if this means diving into specific implementation - e.g. DuplexChannel).

Answer 1

WCF has a ton of performance counters available - from your performance monitor in Windows, you should be able to select a wide range of counters to see how things are going.

You can measure a ton of things, like number of concurrent calls, duration of those calls, and a lot more. Tap into it - it's almost endless in its capabilities! :-)

See this WCF Performance Counters page on MSDN for details.

See how to enable and also monitor perf counters in WCF here or here.