Best practices for moving large amounts of data using WCF ...

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Guest

Hello everyone:

I am looking for everyone's thoughts on moving large amounts (actually, not
very large, but large enough that I'm throwing exceptions using the default
configurations).

We're doing a proof-of-concept on WCF whereby we have a Windows form client
and a Server. Our server is a middle-tier that interfaces with our SQL 05
database server.

Using the "netTcpBindings" (using the default config ... no special
adjustments to buffer size, buffer pool size, etc., etc.) we are invoking a
call to our server, which invokes a stored procedure and returns the query
result. At this point we take the rows in the result set and "package" them
into a hashtable, then return the hashtable to the calling client.

Our original exception was a time-out exception, but with some
experimentation we've learned that wasn't the problem .... although it is
getting reported that way. Turns out it was the amount of data.

The query should return ~11,000 records from the database. From our
experimentation we've noticed we can only return 95 of the rows back before
we throw a "exceded buffer size" exception. Using the default values in our
app.config file that size is 65,536.

Not that moving 11,000 records is smart, but to be limited to only 64Kb in a
communication seems overly restrictive. We can change the value from the
default, but I wanted to ask what other's are doing to work with larger
amounts of data with WCF first?

Are you simply "turning up" the size of the buffer size? Some kind of
paging technique? Some other strategy?? Having a tough time finding answers
on this.

Greatly appreciate any and all comments on this,

Thanks
 
Hi, MobileMan:

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See the attached tutorial three. Let me give you some code here.

protected void GetManyItems()

{

int nRtn = 0;

m_UQueue.SetSize(0);

PushNullException();

while (m_Stack.Count > 0)

{

//a client may either shut down the socket
connection or call IUSocket::Cancel

if (nRtn == SOCKET_NOT_FOUND || nRtn ==
REQUEST_CANCELED)

break;

CTestItem Item = (CTestItem)m_Stack.Pop();

Item.SaveTo(m_UQueue);

//20 kbytes per batch at least

//also shouldn't be too large.

//If the size is too large, it will cost
more memory resource and reduce conccurency if online compressing is
enabled.

//for an opimal value, you'd better test it
by yourself

if (m_UQueue.GetSize() > 20480)

{

nRtn =
SendReturnData(TThreeConst.idGetBatchItemsCTThree, m_UQueue);

m_UQueue.SetSize(0);

PushNullException();

}

}

if (nRtn == SOCKET_NOT_FOUND || nRtn == REQUEST_CANCELED)

{

}

else if (m_UQueue.GetSize() > sizeof(int))

{

nRtn =
SendReturnData(TThreeConst.idGetBatchItemsCTThree, m_UQueue);

}

}

There are a lot of samples inside our SocketPro to demonstrate how to
move a lot of database records, large files, a large collection of items
across machines. See the site
http://www.udaparts.com/document/articles/dialupdb.htm
 
Dear "msgroup":

Thanks for the sales pitch .....

Actually, we're interested in best practices as it pertains to WCF. We've
been doing socket-level programming for far too long - that's the point in
moving up to a higher level abstraction isn't it??

Sounds like a nice product, though.
 
Too bad you can't ask Juval Lowy, the guy who worked with MS to develop
WCF. You could always check out his web site and see if there's any contact
info. I saw him talk about WCF yesterday at the Vista Launch in SF. Pretty
cool stuff. http://www.idesign.net

Good luck.

Robin S.
 
Yea, we've seen their site ... some really good stuff. We're pretty new to
all this, but I haven't seen anybody else who seems to be as "fluent" as they
are. They've obviously put in some serious time on the subject to come up
with all that.

Wish I was there to see him speak too.

From what we've gathered so far (which admitedly isn't much ... not a lot of
people doing this) the way to handle this is using stream-based connections
instead of using buffered - the default. We could go through and change some
of the settings in the config file, but the issue would be did you make the
buffer / max message size "big enough" to handle all possibilities?

I'm not sure just how much of an issue it would be, but conceptually the
idea of taking a setting that defaults at 64Kb and changing it to something
like 75MB, 150MB, or even larger ... just to handle those few-and-far-between
situations that only come up once in a blue moon ... seems wrong somehow.
Dont' get me wrong, though, if that is really the best way to handle this
then we'll be changing the settings! We'd love to hear from someone who's
really using WCF - using large amount of data - and the strategy they've
employed.

I'll drop a note to Juval and maybe get lucky. No matter what, I'll
post-back and let you know what we went with and what the "real world"
results work out like. WCF seems to hold A LOT of promise .... we all just
need more communication about it.

Thanks Robin.
 
They're not just "fluent". Like I said before, Juval actually helped MS
design the WCF stuff. That kind of takes fluent to a whole new level. ;-)
I haven't used it, so unfortunately, I can't help you specifically.

However, here's something that should help. There is a newsgroup
specifically for WCF. WCF used to be called Indigo before the Marketing
people got their claws into it. So I recommend that you post your query to
this newsgroup:

microsoft.public.windows.developer.winfx.indigo

Someone there can probably be very helpful.

Good luck.
Robin S.
-------------------------------------------------
 
Bravo!

--
Stay Mobile


RobinS said:
They're not just "fluent". Like I said before, Juval actually helped MS
design the WCF stuff. That kind of takes fluent to a whole new level. ;-)
I haven't used it, so unfortunately, I can't help you specifically.

However, here's something that should help. There is a newsgroup
specifically for WCF. WCF used to be called Indigo before the Marketing
people got their claws into it. So I recommend that you post your query to
this newsgroup:

microsoft.public.windows.developer.winfx.indigo

Someone there can probably be very helpful.

Good luck.
Robin S.
Click to expand...
 
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Regards,
 
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