Skip to main content

WCF Performance Tuning

Configuring WCF can be a daunting task. So a lot of people just use the WCF default settings and change as little as possible. However changing these defaults can dramatically improve the service performance, so it’s really worth the effort.
Let’s have a look at the most used binding in enterprise environments; the WsHttpBinding.
By default the following setttings are used:

<wsHttpBinding>
 <binding name="BadPerformanceBinding">
  <security mode="Message">
   <message clientCredentialType="..."
   negotiateServiceCredential="true"
   establishSecurityContext="true" />
  </security>
 </binding>
</wsHttpBinding>

There are 2 settings here that can have a negative impact on the performance:

negotiateServiceCredential

This setting determines whether the clients can get the service credential using negotiation with the service. When this setting is set to "true" a bunch of infrastructure soap envelopes are sent on the wire before the client sends its request. When set to "false" the client needs to have the service credentials out of band.

The trade off here is better performance (using "false") versus more convenience (using "true").

establishSecurityContext

This setting determines whether WS-SecureConversation sessions are established between the client and the server. A normal secured web service request requires one asymmetric encryption. Respectively, normal N requests require N asymmetric encryptions. Since asymmetric encryption is very slow, setting up a secure conversation is usually a good practice: It requires a one-time asymmetric encrypted message exchange in order to set up a session; Further calls in the session use symmetric encryption which is much faster.

But most of the time a user sends only one request.In that case set establishSecurityContext to "false".

Remark: As with all performance considerations, measure first!

Popular posts from this blog

DevToys–A swiss army knife for developers

As a developer there are a lot of small tasks you need to do as part of your coding, debugging and testing activities.  DevToys is an offline windows app that tries to help you with these tasks. Instead of using different websites you get a fully offline experience offering help for a large list of tasks. Many tools are available. Here is the current list: Converters JSON <> YAML Timestamp Number Base Cron Parser Encoders / Decoders HTML URL Base64 Text & Image GZip JWT Decoder Formatters JSON SQL XML Generators Hash (MD5, SHA1, SHA256, SHA512) UUID 1 and 4 Lorem Ipsum Checksum Text Escape / Unescape Inspector & Case Converter Regex Tester Text Comparer XML Validator Markdown Preview Graphic Color B

Help! I accidently enabled HSTS–on localhost

I ran into an issue after accidently enabling HSTS for a website on localhost. This was not an issue for the original website that was running in IIS and had a certificate configured. But when I tried to run an Angular app a little bit later on http://localhost:4200 the browser redirected me immediately to https://localhost . Whoops! That was not what I wanted in this case. To fix it, you need to go the network settings of your browser, there are available at: chrome://net-internals/#hsts edge://net-internals/#hsts brave://net-internals/#hsts Enter ‘localhost’ in the domain textbox under the Delete domain security policies section and hit Delete . That should do the trick…

Azure DevOps/ GitHub emoji

I’m really bad at remembering emoji’s. So here is cheat sheet with all emoji’s that can be used in tools that support the github emoji markdown markup: All credits go to rcaviers who created this list.