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Checklist: Web Services Performance

Source: http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/en-us/dnpag/html/ScaleNetCheck09.asp
J.D. Meier, Srinath Vasireddy, Ashish Babbar, Rico Mariani, and Alex Mackman

Design Considerations

* Design chunky interfaces to reduce round trips.
* Prefer message-based programming over remote procedure call (RPC) style.
* Use literal message encoding for parameter formatting.
* Prefer primitive types for Web service parameters.
* Avoid maintaining server state between calls.
* Consider input validation for costly Web methods.
* Consider your approach to caching.
* Consider approaches for bulk data transfer and attachments.
* Avoid calling local Web Services.

Connections

* Configure the maxconnection attribute.
* Prioritize and allocate connections across discrete Web services.
* Use a single identity for outbound calls.
* Consider UnsafeAuthenticatedConnectionSharing with Windows Integrated Authentication.
* Use PreAuthenticate with Basic authentication.

Threading

* Tune the thread pool using the formula for reducing contention.
* Consider minIoThreads and minWorkerThreads for intermittent burst load.

One Way (Fire and Forget) Communication

* Consider using the OneWay attribute if you do not require a response.

Asynchronous Web Methods

* Use asynchronous Web methods for I/O operations.
* Do not use asynchronous Web methods when you depend on worker threads.

Asynchronous Invocation

* Consider calling Web services asynchronously when you have additional parallel work.
* Use asynchronous invocation to call multiple unrelated Web services.
* Call Web services asynchronously for UI responsiveness.

Timeouts

* Set your proxy timeout appropriately.
* Set your ASP.NET timeout greater than your Web service timeout.
* Abort connections for ASP.NET pages that timeout before a Web services call completes.
* Consider the responseDeadlockInterval attribute.

WebMethods

* Prefer primitive parameter types.
* Consider buffering.
* Consider caching responses.
* Enable session state only for Web methods that need it.

Serialization

* Reduce serialization with XmlIgnore.
* Reduce round trips.
* Consider XML compression.

Caching

* Consider output caching for less volatile data.
* Consider providing cache-related information to clients.
* Consider perimeter caching.

State Management

* Use session state only where it is needed.
* Avoid server affinity.

Attachments

* Prefer Base64 encoding. Direct Internet Message Encapsulation (DIME) is a supported part of Web Services Enhancements (WSE), but Microsoft® is not investing in this approach long-term. DIME is limited because the attachments are outside the SOAP envelope.

COM Interop

* Avoid single-threaded apartment (STA) COM objects.

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