How can netTcpBinding be slower than wsHttpBinding?

Question

Hi,

I have implemented a scenario which uses netTcpBinding and WsHttpBinding with Transport Security(https) as communication binding type in WCF. Then I compared the performance results. Interestingly, netTcpBinding was slower than wsHttpBinding. I have read a a lot of documents about binding performance and I know that the netTcpBinding provides the fastest communication because of binary encoding.

Can you explain what may cause this situation in my tests? Thanks.

Test environment: IIS 7

public static WSHttpBinding GetWSHttpForSSLBinding()
{
   WSHttpBinding binding = new WSHttpBinding();
   binding.TransactionFlow = true;
   binding.MaxReceivedMessageSize = 2147483647;
   binding.MessageEncoding = WSMessageEncoding.Text;
   binding.Security.Mode = SecurityMode.Transport;
   binding.Security.Transport.ClientCredentialType = HttpClientCredentialType.None;
   binding.ReaderQuotas.MaxStringContentLength = 2147483647;
   binding.OpenTimeout = TimeSpan.MaxValue;
   binding.CloseTimeout = TimeSpan.MaxValue;
   binding.SendTimeout = TimeSpan.MaxValue;
   binding.ReceiveTimeout = TimeSpan.MaxValue;
   return binding;
}

public static NetTcpBinding GetTcpBinding()
{
   NetTcpBinding binding = new NetTcpBinding();
   binding.TransactionFlow = true;
   binding.MaxReceivedMessageSize = 2147483647;
   binding.PortSharingEnabled = true;
   binding.Security.Mode = SecurityMode.Transport;
   binding.Security.Transport.ClientCredentialType = TcpClientCredentialType.Windows;
   binding.Security.Transport.ProtectionLevel = ProtectionLevel.EncryptAndSign;
   binding.Security.Message.ClientCredentialType = MessageCredentialType.Windows;
   binding.Security.Message.AlgorithmSuite = SecurityAlgorithmSuite.TripleDesSha256;
   binding.ReaderQuotas.MaxStringContentLength = 2147483647;
   binding.ReaderQuotas.MaxArrayLength = 2147483647;
   binding.OpenTimeout = TimeSpan.MaxValue;
   binding.CloseTimeout = TimeSpan.MaxValue;
   binding.SendTimeout = TimeSpan.MaxValue;
   binding.ReceiveTimeout = TimeSpan.MaxValue;
   return binding;
}

Answer 1

Your net.tcp binding uses authentication but ws http binding doesn't. Alse repeat your test with several operation calls from single proxy and with bigger message load. First call is always slow because of channel creation and connection establishment.

Answer 2

Are you talking about latency or throughput. Does a client create a connection and then immediately close it or does it span over multiple calls.

NetTcp has optimization over a same connection and payload size would be smaller since it uses BinaryEncoding vs TextEncoding for wshttp.

If you are looking at latency - NetTcp does windows auth with causes an AD lookup vs on wshttp you are using SSL auth.