The socket connection was aborted - CommunicationException

Question

Originally:

• I thought this was a circular reference problem........turns out it's not.
• The problem arose from having not configured the service configurations at all.
• Since the defaults are very low, sending lots of data will make the service collapse.

Scenario:

• It seems I may have circular references in my WCF service, but using "[DataContract(IsReference=true)]", does nothing to help fix it.
• I receive the error "The socket connection was aborted. This could be caused by an error processing your message or a receive timeout being exceeded by the remote host, or an underlying network resource issue. Local socket timeout was '00:01:00'."
• Have I missed something?

Code:

[DataContract(IsReference=true)]
public class Message
{
    [DataMember]
    public string TopicName { get; set; }

    [DataMember]
    public string EventData { get; set; }

    [DataMember]
    public SerializableDictionary<string, FuturesLineAsset> FuturesLineDictionary { get; set ; }
}

Thoughts:

• I wonder if it's because I have a class FuturesAsset, that has a property of type BindableDictionary (THIS IS A CUSTOM OBJECT), and that property holds a list of FuturesLinesAssets.
• See below:

Parent:

public class FuturesAsset
{
    public string AssetName { get; set; }
    public BindableDictionary<string, FuturesLineAsset> AssetLines { get; private set; }

    public FuturesAsset()
    {
        AssetLines = new BindableDictionary<string, FuturesLineAsset>();
    }

    public FuturesAsset(string assetName)
    {
        AssetLines = new BindableDictionary<string, FuturesLineAsset>();
        AssetName = assetName;
    }
}

Child:

public class FuturesLineAsset
{

    public string ReferenceAsset { get; set; }
    public string MID { get; set; }
    public double LivePrice { get; set; }
    public DateTime UpdateTime { get; set; }
    public DateTime LastContributedTime { get; set; }
    public double Spread { get; set; }
    public double Correlation { get; set; }
    public DateTime Maturity { get; set; }
    public double ReferenceCurve { get; set; }

    public FuturesLineAsset(string mID, string referenceAsset, double livePrice)
    {
        MID = mID;
        ReferenceAsset = referenceAsset;
        ReutersLivePrice = livePrice;
    }
}

Answer 1

This error can be caused by a number of things. While it was a timing issue in this case, it usually has nothing to do with timings, especially if the error is received immediately. Possible reasons are:

• The objects used as parameters or return types in your contract don't have parameterless constructors and are not decorated with the DataContract attribute. Check the classes used as parameters or return types, but also all the types used by the public properties of those classes. If you implement a constructor with parameters for one of those classes, the compiler will not add the default parameterless constructor for you anymore, so you will need to add that yourself.
• The default limits defined in service configuration are too low (MaxItemsInObjectGraph, MaxReceivedMessageSize, MaxBufferPoolSize, MaxBufferSize, MaxArrayLength).
• Some public properties of your DataContract objects are read-only. Make sure all public properties have both getters and setters.

Answer 2

that exception is not related to Circular Reference, it's just purely timing out as you try to pump tons of data over the wire.

The default values that comes with WCF are very very low (these have been changed in WCF 4 I believe). Have a read on these two blog posts, they should give you an idea on how to dethrottle your service:

Creating high performance WCF services

How to throttle a Wcf service, help prevent DoS attacks, and maintain Wcf scalability

Update: also, there are a number of different timeouts in the WCF configuration and depending whether it's the client or server you're talking about you need to update a different timeout clause... have a read of this thread on what each one means and you should be able to figure out which one you need to bump up. Or, you could just set every timeout to int.max if you don't really care if a call can take a loong time to complete.

Answer 3

Had this problem with a long intialisation process that was being called from the OnStart event of a Windows Service Host installer. Fixed by setting the security mode and timeouts for the TCP binding.

            // Create a channel factory.
            NetTcpBinding b = new NetTcpBinding();
            b.Security.Mode = SecurityMode.Transport;
            b.Security.Transport.ClientCredentialType = TcpClientCredentialType.Windows;
            b.Security.Transport.ProtectionLevel = System.Net.Security.ProtectionLevel.EncryptAndSign;

            b.MaxReceivedMessageSize = 1000000;
            b.OpenTimeout = TimeSpan.FromMinutes(2);
            b.SendTimeout = TimeSpan.FromMinutes(2);
            b.ReceiveTimeout = TimeSpan.FromMinutes(10);