Earlier this year, Microsoft released a document comparing performance between the .NET StockTrader and IBM WebSphere’s Trade 6.1 sample application. While the .NET solution kicked some WAS-ass (best .NET configuration was 2422 peak TPS vs 630 of WAS), it was more interesting to note the performance difference between a WCF configuration and the ASMX configuration – .NET Self-Hosted Tcp-Binary Encoding achieved 2422 TPS while the .NET Self-Hosted HTTP/XML encoding managed only 1340 TPS. Microsoft says,
- Self-hosting WCF services can lead to performance advantages over hosting .NET Web Services in IIS—even when operating over an HTTP-XML basicHttpBinding. Self hosted WCF HTTP Web Services offer 56% better throughout than the ASMX equivalent services hosted in IIS for this test. They offer 45% better throughput than the equivalent WCF IIS-hosted service operating over Http-XML.
- The self-hosted WCF services can also support, simultaneously, the netTcp WCF binding, with binary encoding. This can lead to significant performance boosts for remote calls. The WCF netTcpBinding replaces .NET Binary Remoting (used with .NET 1.1 and 2.0) as the preferred way for remote calls between .NET clients and remote .NET services. Supporting both HTTP/XML and TCP/Binary requires no extra development, as WCF unifies the programming model for HTTP-based Web Services and .NET Binary-remoted components, and service hosts will listen simultaneously on all configured endpoints to support any different type of client on any platform.
- The Tcp-Binary binding (netTcpBinding) between the ASP.NET clients and the Web Service host offer 81% better throughput than the WCF basicHttpBinding used in the same self-host .NET executable. The Tcp-Binary remote mode offers 284% better throughput than the fastest WebSphere Web Service configuration (JDBC data access).
The future of web services is WCF TCP with binary encoding.
- Read article: http://go.microsoft.com/?linkid=6895275 (Note If you have difficulty opening this PDF document directly, try saving it locally first.)
- The .NET StockTrader application: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/netframework/bb499684.aspx
- IBM WebSphere Trade 6.1 application: http://go.microsoft.com/?linkid=6895278