Is there any way to profile performance of a WCF Application?

Question

Hi,

We're trying to measure performance of our system, which is a .NET 3.5 application that uses WCF calls.

Problem is until now, we weren't able to profile the methods inside these calls. A winforms client application was coded to test our system. We tried using ANTS 4 Profiler and VS2008 built-in Performance Analyzer, but we only got the total time of the WCF call. We would like to be able to measure all the calls that are being made inside of the WCF call.

Does anybody know if that's possible?

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

There is quite a bit of performance testing functionality built into Visual Studio Team System Test Edition.

Take a look on this page and scroll down to the section Introduction to Load Tests.

Also this WCF Load Test application on codeplex might be helpful

Answer 2

So your application can run under VS, but WCF calls off to an environment where you cannot get profiling visibility, but you want to know what goes on in there?

Even if you find out how WCF uses time inside itself, any changes you make will have to be in your code. If you want to find out where in your code you can do something about performance, you can use the VS profiler. Personally, I just use stackshots, which are very effective at finding out what code to optimize under any environment, including C#.