WinFX

ASP.NET 2.0 WebService vs WCF Nov CTP Performance Comparison

Gaurav Khanna [gaurav@wintoolzone.com] — Sat, 07 Jan 2006 02:50:00 GMT

One of the frequently asked questions at the India Windows Communication Foundation Tour was how does WCF scale as compared to existing technologies, like ASMX? Will WCF services be more scalable than the ones we author today? What do we have to do for better scale?

I thought of doing some very basic performance tests to get some data for these questions. The test was done to compare how ASP.NET 2.0 WebServices perform against WCF services. I did these tests on my machine which has 2GB RAM, 60GB HDD and running Windows XP SP2 and IIS 5.1. They were done against NOV CTP of WinFX, building the WCF service using VS 2005 RTM under the debug mode. Below are the results of the same.

Disclaimer: These results are not, by any means, definitive and are just the output of the tests I did. WCF continues to evolve and by the time it is released, the results could vary. You may have different results.

The following are the properties of the tests:

Entities tested were ASP.NET 2.0 WebService with BasicProfile 1.1 WebServiceBinding on IIS 5.1 and the WCF self-hosted console executable service (debug mode) with BasicHttpBinding enabled.
Three types of load tests were created using VSTS
- Starting with 10 user load till maximum 250 users, incrementing users by 50 every 10 seconds
- Starting with 10 user load till maximum 1000 users, incrementing users by 50 every 10 seconds
- Constant load of 500 users
Test ASP.NET 2.0 webservice can be download from here, and Test WCF service can be downloaded from here.

Starting with 10 user load till maximum 250 users, incrementing users by 50 every 10 seconds

ASP.NET 2.0 WebService:

WCF Service:

Result: WCF handles 51.2% more average test cases per second than ASMX with 4.38 times faster average test time.

Starting with 10 user load till maximum 1000 users, incrementing users by 50 every 10 seconds

ASP.NET 2.0 WebService:

WCF Service:

Result: WCF handles 56.79% more average test cases per second than ASMX with 18.82 times faster average test time.

Constant load with 500 users

ASP.NET 2.0 WebService:

WCF Service:

Result: WCF handles 124.11% more average test cases per second than ASMX.

More tests to follow...

Single Service implementation for WCF, .NET Remoting and ASMX

Gaurav Khanna — Thu, 05 Jan 2006 21:55:00 GMT

[Original Post Date: 4th January 2005]

I stumbled on this post by Matt, which is an excellent article that describes how to author a single service that can be consumed by client of .NET Remoting, WCF and ASMX.

Must Read.

[Article] Sharing State across Clients in Windows Communication Foundation (WCF)

Gaurav Khanna — Thu, 05 Jan 2006 21:54:00 GMT

[Original Post Date: 2nd January 2005]

With WCF, state management in services get more capabilities than just Singleton and PerCall approaches. Two new modes have been introduced that take state management to the next level. PerSession and Shareable modes allow for private sessions and shared sessions across specific clients respectively.

I have authored the article, Sharing State across Clients in Windows Communication Foundation, which attempts to help understand these modes of state management with complete source code to illustrate their behavior and potential usage. You can read the article and download the related source code from here.

Note: Source code has been written against and tried with WinFX November 2005 CTP.

[Download] WCF Tour India Demos for Nov CTP

Gaurav Khanna — Thu, 05 Jan 2006 21:49:00 GMT

[Original Post Date: 26th December 2005]

I have updated the WinFX Beta 1 based WCF Tour India demos for WinFX November 2005 CTP. You can download them from here.

[Article] Service Orientation tenets and Home Delivery of Pizza

Gaurav Khanna — Thu, 05 Jan 2006 21:45:00 GMT

[Original Post Date: 18th December 2005]

Service orientation is a concept and a way of thinking on how to design distributed systems. Technologies like Windows Communication Foundation implement these concepts and make them real. In order to understand the power of such technologies, its imperative we understand SO.

I have attempted to help understand this abstract concept in an article titled Service Orientation and Home Delivery of Pizza that you can read here.

WCF India Tour Presentations and Demos

Gaurav Khanna — Thu, 05 Jan 2006 18:08:00 GMT

[Original Post Date: 23rd November 2005]

I just concluded the Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) India Tour after two weeks in 4 cities. Download:

Presentations from here
Demos (based upon Indigo Beta 1 and VS 2005 Beta 2) from here

WinFX November CTP Released

Gaurav Khanna — Thu, 05 Jan 2006 18:06:00 GMT

[Original Post Date: 21st November 2005]

The WinFX November CTP has been released and it works with VS 2005 RTM release. Download the various components:

WinFX Runtime Components - http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=E5376297-DA10-4FC3-967D-38C96F767FC4&displaylang=en
WinFX SDK - http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=0A118D5F-21E7-4A3E-82D9-F30C6CE3F63D&displaylang=en
Visual Studio Extensions for WinFX - http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=2202A637-2B68-40C0-B3AE-9235D60F42C4&displaylang=en

The ReadMe for November CTP is here.

Windows Communication Foundation (Indigo) India Tour

Gaurav Khanna [gaurav@wintoolzone.com] — Thu, 05 Jan 2006 18:03:00 GMT

[Original Post Date: 9th November 2005]

Windows Communication Foundation, formerly codenamed Indigo, is the future of Microsoft distributed computing platform. And to take it to the next level in India, we are having Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) Tour across the month of November. The dates are as below:

City	Date
Bangalore	10th November
Pune	15th November
Chennai	17th November
Hyderabad	22nd November

In this tour, we will enable the attendee to understand WCF, its relation with service orientation and Microsoft's distributed communication platform commitment and its roadmap. It will help understand the technology better, its interoperability aspects and also understand the best practices to be undertaken today for a smoother migration from existing technologies (ASMX, Remoting, ES, MSMQ) to WCF.

For more details and registration, visit http://www.microsoft.com/india/msdn/events/.