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Here are some performance numbers for adding 100 "hello azure" messages into a queue (using ThreadPool for each message insert) from on-premise:

Managed API: 15,287 ms

REST API: 7,758 ms

Can this have something to do with internal locking in the managed API upon calling AddMessage() or something like that?

I  also made my own tcp/ip server running inside azure in a worker role for adding messages to the queue. And by my homegrown tcp/ip worker role I got just over 3 000 ms in adding 100 messages from outside azure (under half the time the REST API uses). What about making a general tcp/ip interface towards the queue API and making a managed wrapper over that on the client side?

But the really strange part is that the managed api was even slower inside an azure worker role than from on-premise. How can that be??

From within a worker role in azure, adding 100 messages took over 20 000 ms (5 000 ms more than from the outside)..

Why is the managed storage API for queues so slow compared to the REST API? According to my tests the REST API seems to be substantially faster.

I thought it was just a wrapper for the REST API...

Thanks for the show! Always fun and interesting! Though you could cut back on the who's who jokes

I have to say I really like the idea of letting the community ask questions. I would love if this could be a fixed part of your show like tip-of-the-week  In the spirit of one-question-only :

1a) Recently I tried to deploy a simple worker role that basically did nothing but wait. Still it took over several minutes from "Initializing" to the "Ready" state was shown. This caused me to believe that my package was buggy. I actually used several hours to finally figure out that I just had to wait for like 5 minutes. Can you explain why starting an app takes so long?

1b) Will there be some more diagnostics available for apps that don't even start? I know about IntelliTrace, but let's face it, not every company out there can afford the ultimate edition of VS2010... Many times I've uploaded packages that won't run for some reason (forgot to change devstore, used a non-native dll ref without local copy and what have you). This is by far the biggest pain of the windows azure experience right now.

1c) On a related note to the question above, why does deploying a package first have a screen with a button saying "Processing..." and then afterwards shows a progress bar saying "deploying...". And when you click "Run" it says "Enabling deployment...". What are all these seemingly identical processes doing?

1d) Still related to the above somehow, ehem... As mentioned, you thought about doing a piece on the service bus. Well, what about a piece about how to set up access from azure to your on-premise sql server? This is what every man, woman and androgynous person wants and dreams of.. Well, at least until sql azure gets backup capabilities

Thanks! Very informative and fun episode.. I'm getting more and more cloud-horny On-premise seems so lame... and gay!

Thanks Steve. I got it all wrong then. 500 msg per sec is actually pretty OK, and you can also put up as many queues as you like, right? So say I need about 2000 msg/sec throughput, I could create queue1 to queue4 and come out at about 2000 msg/sec. Thanks a lot for answering anyway! You guys way cool

Thanks for the great show! But whats up with the throughput on these queues?? Isn't it about 500 msg/min or something?

Hi. Just wanted to thank you for another great episode. This really helped me understand better how to work with WCF inside Azure. You guys rock!!!

Thanks again. I think my problem is the load-balancing thing described in the Known Issues, as you mention.

Thanks Ryan. I already checked out the first url you mention. So I think my problem is related to the WCF-service that I try to consume from within my azure web role. There's a whole lot of auto web.config stuff going on that probably don't work for live production, but only in the test-environment or something. Maybe you could make a quick demo of setting up a simple hello world wcf-service inside a web role? And again, thanks! You and smarx are a great team and I can't wait for the next show

Thanks for the great show - I love it that you keep releasing shows at a quick pace and also throw in a bit of humour into the mix

But seriously, I'm a .NET expert - I actually programmed it even before it was released, and read like C# books before it came out. But alas I'm an Azure noob and I can't even get a simple web role to work - I have VS2010 RTM and Azure tools 1.1 and when I try to upload my package to staging it's stuck in "Initializing - Stopping - Stopped" and there's of course no diagnostics to find anywhere even though I'm pretty sure i set up the Diagnostics connection string correctly. I'm sure I have a web.config or other config error somewhere.

 Please, make a walkthrough of making azure services - this is unfortunately not as easy as it should be.