Why it's so slow when a wcf client connects to the service?

Question

Hi All, I met a performance issue when using the WCF service.

Here's the story:

1. I wrote a self-hosted WCF service which is hosted by a console application;

2. I wrote a simple client to consume the service;

3. After the WCF service is running, it takes over 15 seconds for the client to create connection with the service.

The WCF service is extremely simple just something like "Hello World". Is this normal?

Answer 1

This should help: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa751883.aspx

If you host on IIS, that takes a while to start up no matter what.

Answer 2

One way could be to add your own warmup script; a script that calls your service on initial load.

Though, this answer might help you, usually, the first access to the service is slow, but the consecutive accesses would be within a sec or two.

The first slow response is related to the JIT compilation of the service assemblies; which means its normal.

Alternatively, you may want to Profile you app. Also you may would like to checkout this article that I wrote some time back.