Is WCF right for the job? Queues and Multiple Worker Servers

Question

I am a novice to MSMQ and WCF and need some direction. The application we're working on requires heavy PDF parsing jobs and these jobs can take considerable time to finish. Users will request these jobs from a single ASP.net application. To scale out, we would like to have the PDF Parser service spread across multiple physical (or virtual) servers and use some sort of queuing system to manage the job requests. Is WCF a good technology to look at in this situation? Has anyone done something similar? If so, any advice would be appreciated.

Answer 1

I may not understand everything you're trying to do, but initially my answer is 'yes', I do think it's a good technology to consider. Here's an interesting article on combining WCF with MSMQ, especially if you're looking at MSMQ messages that are larger than 4 MB in size (which is the max size of a MSMQ message). The article is a walk-through on how to build a WCF client/server application to handle the processing of images via a MSMQ queue. It may be applicable to your situation. The nice part of the article and walk-through is that the author builds a chunking channel that breaks the image up into 4 MB chunks so that it can be sent via WCF/MSMQ in order to be processed. If you're looking at large PDF files, this may be something to look into.

I've worked with WCF quite a bit, and I'm a huge fan. While I haven't worked with WCF/MSMQ applications as much, it's still a nice implementation and I think marrying the power of WCF and the reliability of MSMQ is a huge win.

Good luck. Hope this helps.