Performance Tuning WCF Service

Question

What is the single most important performance tuning area for a WCF Web service?

• ASP.net Thread settings?
• WCF throttling?

Answer 1

There's so much that depends upon your application design, hardware and load.

If I had to pick one technique, it would probably be using single call objects.

Throttling is helpful once you have a feel for the peak load your system can handle.

Answer 2

Well the first thing to see is if WCF is your bottleneck or is it something else (like your DB calls etc.). Most performance improvement can be done by the usual stuff (nothing special to WCF) like caching, optimised DB access, choice of data structures, alogirthms etc.'

Something specific to WCF is to design all web service calls to be stateless so that they can be easily scaled on multiple servers using load balancing. Try to have coarse grain services that are not very chatty. If your service consumer is .Net based use the Net.Tcp protoccol, it has much better marshalling than SOAP/HTTP. WCF throttles quite conservatively, you will do better to increase the throttling limits.