Improving WCF performance

Question

Could I know ways to improve performance of my .Net WCF service? Right now its pretty slow and sometimes it gets clogged & eventually stops responding.

Answer 1

What binding are you using? If you're using HTTP you could get better perfomance with TCP.

In all likelihood though the bottleneck is going to be higher up in the WCF pipeline and possibly in your hosted objects.

We'd need some more details about your WCF set up to be able to help much.

Answer 2

Well, what sort of data are you sending, and over what binding?

Is the problem the size of requests (bandwidth), or the quantity of requests (latency). If latency, then simply make fewer, but bigger, requests ;-p

For bandwidth: if you are sending binary data over http, you can enable MTOM - that'll save you a few bytes. You can enable compression support at the server, but this isn't guaranteed.

If you are using .NET to .NET, you might want to consider protobuf-net; this has WCF hooks for swapping the formatter (DataContractSerializer) to use google's "protocol buffers" binary format, which is very small and fast. I can advise on how on request.

Other than that: send less data ;-p

Answer 3

What kind of InstanceContextMode and ConcurrencyMode are you using on your service class?

If it's PerCall instances, you might want to check if you can reduce the overhead of creating a server instance for each call.

If it's Single instances (singleton) - do you really need that? :-) Try using PerCall instead.

Marc

Answer 4

The symptoms you describe could be caused by anything at all. You'll need to narrow it down by using a profiler such as JetBrain's dotTrace or Automated QA's AQTime.

Or you could do it the old fashioned way by instrumenting your code (which is what the profilers do for you). Collect the start time before your operation starts. When it finishes, subtract the start time from the curren time to determine the elapsed time, then print it out or log it or whatever. Do the same around the methods that this operation calls. You'll quickly see which methods are taking the longest time. Then, move into those methods and do the same, finding out what makes them take so long, etc.

Answer 5

"Improve performance of my .Net WCF service" - its very generic term you are asking, different ways we can improve performance and at the sametime you need to find which one causing performance hit like DB access in WCF methods.

Please try to know available features in WCF like oneWay WCF method it will help you in finding ways to improve performance.

Thanks Venkat