WCF Windows Service TimeOut

Question

I have a client application developed in .net seding a request to wcf service and supposed to send reponse .if execution time with in 1 minute,there is no error,if it exceeds 1 minute the error is

Inner exception: This request operation sent to net.tcp://localhost:18001/PitToPort/2008/01/30/StockpileService/tcp did not receive a reply within the configured timeout (00:01:00).
The time allotted to this operation may have been a portion of a longer timeout. This may be because the service is still processing the operation or because the service was unable to send a reply message. Please consider increasing the operation timeout (by casting the channel/proxy to IContextChannel and setting the OperationTimeout property) and ensure that the service is able to connect to the client

How to increase the time out and how? What is the best solution?

Answer 1

Be careful, this error message is a boilerplate string WCF sends when it doesn't have a clue what happened. It really means "mmh something went wrong in the chain but I'm not really sure what, so, here's some trivia about the configuration, do what you want with it".

MOST OF THE TIME when you get this message it has nothing to do with actual timeouts. It can be quotas (number of objects in the graph, overall size, array length) or something that went wrong server-side, between the time your service method returned a result and the actual bytes were sent over the wire. So, you should check your configuration settings (and not the timeout, except if you had to actually wait for one minute to get the error. If you got the error straight away, it has nothing to do with timeouts whatsoever).

This useless message is on top of my list of WCF annoyances.

Answer 2

The timeout is called "sendTimeout" and you can configure it on your binding section in your config file, or in code - your choice.

config:

  <system.serviceModel>
    <bindings>
      <netTcpBinding>
        <binding sendTimeout="00:03:00" />
      </netTcpBinding>
    </bindings>

This will set the timeout to 3 minutes.

Marc