Analyzing why WCF much slower than WSE webservice

Question

We have a web service with both WSE 3.0 endpoints and the newer WCF endpoints on .NET Framework 4.5.

WCF is using basicHttpBinding.

The problem is that the new WCF bindings appear to be significantly slower (~3x). Does it use the same mechanism under the hood?

I've read a lot about enabling WCF tracing. But when I enable that on production I get way to much information and don't really know how read e.g. the timeline in Microsoft Trace Viewer.

I would appreciate any help

• Tips for finding causes of the performance difference
• Idea from a theoretical standpoint, e.g. are there any major differences under the hood in how WCF processes a request?
• Any tools that can help to profile WCF server

Notes:

• The issue exists in production; on the test servers everything goes fine. At first we suspected that the load balancer might be a factor, but disabling the load balancer does not change the performance at all

• The slowness could be due our application/domain layer of course. Maybe some thread/connection pool is blocking and messages are getting queued because of that.

  In this case does anyone have an idea why the behaviour is so different from WSE (which runs on the same application pool)? Did any queue sizes/concurrent processing default configurations change dramatically between WSE3.0 and WCF?

  Is there a way to find out when this is happening? E.g. some perfmon counters to watch? In perfmon I just get lost choosing between the huge amount of performance counters available

Update

Here's an anonymized version of our service Web.config:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<configuration>
    <configSections>
        <section name="microsoft.web.services2" type="Microsoft.Web.Services2.Configuration.WebServicesConfiguration, Microsoft.Web.Services2, Version=2.0.3.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35" />
        <section name="log4net" type="log4net.Config.Log4NetConfigurationSectionHandler, log4net" />
    </configSections>
    <system.web>
        <httpRuntime executionTimeout="900" maxRequestLength="10240" />
        <webServices>
            <!--<wsdlHelpGenerator href="CustomizedWebServicePage.aspx" />-->
            <protocols>
                <add name="HttpGet" />
                <add name="HttpPost" />
            </protocols>
            <soapExtensionTypes>
                <add type="Microsoft.Web.Services2.WebServicesExtension, Microsoft.Web.Services2, Version=2.0.3.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35" priority="1" group="0" />
            </soapExtensionTypes>
        </webServices>
        <compilation defaultLanguage="cs" debug="true" targetFramework="4.5" />
        <customErrors mode="RemoteOnly" />
        <!-- dev only - application pool identity is configured on real environment -->
        <identity impersonate="true" userName="ServiceIdentity" password="********" />
        <authentication mode="Windows" />
        <authorization>
            <allow users="*" />
            <!-- Allow all users -->
        </authorization>
        <trace enabled="false" requestLimit="10" pageOutput="false" traceMode="SortByTime" localOnly="true" />
        <sessionState mode="InProc" cookieless="false" timeout="20" sqlConnectionString="data source=127.0.0.1;user id=someuserid;password=********;port=42424" />
        <globalization requestEncoding="utf-8" responseEncoding="utf-8" />
        <pages controlRenderingCompatibilityVersion="3.5" clientIDMode="AutoID" />
    </system.web>
    <microsoft.web.services2>
        <diagnostics>
            <detailedErrors enabled="true" />
        </diagnostics>
        <policy>
            <cache name="policyCache.xml" />
        </policy>
        <security>
            <timeToleranceInSeconds>43200</timeToleranceInSeconds>
            <defaultTtlInSeconds>43200</defaultTtlInSeconds>
            <x509 storeLocation="LocalMachine" verifyTrust="false" />
            <securityTokenManager type="OurProduct.Business.Authentication.CustomUsernameTokenManager, OurProduct.Business, Version=5.0.2.11517, Culture=neutral" qname="wsse:UsernameToken" xmlns:wsse="http://docs.oasis-open.org/wss/2004/01/oasis-200401-wss-wssecurity-secext-1.0.xsd" />
        </security>
        <messaging>
            <maxRequestLength>10240</maxRequestLength>
        </messaging>
    </microsoft.web.services2>
    <startup>
        <supportedRuntime version="v2.0.50727" />
    </startup>
    <system.serviceModel>
        <diagnostics wmiProviderEnabled="true">
            <messageLogging logMalformedMessages="true" logMessagesAtTransportLevel="true" />
        </diagnostics>
        <serviceHostingEnvironment aspNetCompatibilityEnabled="true" multipleSiteBindingsEnabled="true" />
        <services>
            <service behaviorConfiguration="OurServiceBehavior" name="OurProduct.Service.OurService">
                <endpoint address=""      binding="basicHttpBinding"  bindingConfiguration="BasicHttpBinding_IXXXOurService" bindingNamespace="http://localhost/XXXOurService" contract="OurProduct.ServiceContracts.XXXOurService.IXXXOurService" />
            </service>
        </services>
        <behaviors>
            <serviceBehaviors>
                <behavior name="OurServiceBehavior">
                    <dataContractSerializer maxItemsInObjectGraph="2147483647" />
                    <serviceMetadata httpGetEnabled="false" httpsGetEnabled="true" />
                    <serviceDebug includeExceptionDetailInFaults="true" />
                    <serviceCredentials>
                        <userNameAuthentication userNamePasswordValidationMode="Custom" customUserNamePasswordValidatorType="OurProduct.Service.Validation.CustomUserNamePasswordValidator, OurProduct.Service" />
                    </serviceCredentials>
                </behavior>
                <behavior name="">
                    <serviceMetadata httpGetEnabled="true" httpsGetEnabled="true" />
                    <serviceDebug includeExceptionDetailInFaults="false" />
                </behavior>
            </serviceBehaviors>
        </behaviors>
        <bindings>
            <basicHttpBinding>
                <binding name="BasicHttpBinding_IXXXOurService" closeTimeout="00:01:00" openTimeout="00:01:00" receiveTimeout="00:15:00" sendTimeout="00:15:00" bypassProxyOnLocal="false" hostNameComparisonMode="StrongWildcard" maxBufferPoolSize="524288000" maxBufferSize="524288000" transferMode="Buffered" maxReceivedMessageSize="524288000" messageEncoding="Mtom" textEncoding="utf-8" useDefaultWebProxy="true" allowCookies="false">
                    <readerQuotas maxDepth="524288000" maxStringContentLength="524288000" maxArrayLength="524288000" maxBytesPerRead="524288000" maxNameTableCharCount="524288000" />
                    <security mode="TransportWithMessageCredential">
                        <transport clientCredentialType="None"     />
                        <message   clientCredentialType="UserName" />
                    </security>
                </binding>
            </basicHttpBinding>
        </bindings>
    </system.serviceModel>
    <runtime>
        <gcServer     enabled="true" />
        <gcConcurrent enabled="true" />
    </runtime>
    <system.webServer>
        <security>
            <requestFiltering>
                <requestLimits maxAllowedContentLength="10485761" /> <!-- 10 megabytes -->
            </requestFiltering>
        </security>
    </system.webServer>
</configuration>

Answer 1

Your WCF service configuration file does not appear to have throttling values explicitly set. You may want to use performance monitor to track the WCF resources and/or adjust the default values to make sure you are not hitting the default throttle limit.

Service throttling (serviceThrottling) allows you to even out the load on your backend WCF servers and to enforce resource allocation. serviceThrottling behavior for backend WCF services is configured by modifying the values for the maxConcurrentCalls, maxConcurrentSessions, and maxConcurrentInstances parameters in the config file for the WCF service.

<serviceThrottling
maxConcurrentCalls="200"
maxConcurrentSessions="200"
maxConcurrentInstances="200" />

https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee377061%28v=bts.70%29.aspx