WCF Response Message Takes 40 Minutes and No Timeout Exception is Thrown

Question

I have a WCF service hosted in IIS7 (the service and client configuration is at the end of this post). I have run across an odd scenario that I was hoping someone might have some ideas about how to attack it and find a solution.

The service only exposes one contract, 'ProcessMessage'. I can send/receive synchronous messages from the service using that contract just fine with expected performance, but one particular call to that contract returns more than 65KB of data; about 1 MB. Upon originally calling it, I received the expected max receive size exceeded error. So I increased the maxReceivedMessageSize, and now this particular call takes 40 minutes to return to the client. This is well beyond any of the timeout settings, and well beyond what I would expect it to take. The server side processing time is only 2 seconds. It appears to be held up on the client side.

I've also tried bumping up several of the other quotas in the file to no avail.

Any thoughts would be greatly appreciated. Thanks.

Service Config:

  <system.serviceModel>
<services>
  <service behaviorConfiguration="Lrs.Esf.Facade.Startup.FacadeBehavior"
    name="Lrs.Esf.Facade.Startup.FacadeService">
    <endpoint address="" binding="wsHttpBinding" bindingConfiguration="default" contract="Lrs.Esf.Facade.Startup.IFacadeService">
      <identity>
        <servicePrincipalName value="lrsdomain/PensionDev" />
      </identity>
    </endpoint>
    <endpoint address="mex" binding="mexHttpBinding" contract="IMetadataExchange" />
  </service>
</services>
<bindings>
  <wsHttpBinding>
    <binding name="default">
      <security mode="None"/>
    </binding>
  </wsHttpBinding>
</bindings>
<behaviors>
  <serviceBehaviors>
    <behavior name="Lrs.Esf.Facade.Startup.FacadeBehavior">
      <!-- To avoid disclosing metadata information, set the value below to false and remove the metadata endpoint above before deployment -->
      <serviceMetadata httpGetEnabled="true" />
      <!-- To receive exception details in faults for debugging purposes, set the value below to true.  Set to false before deployment to avoid disclosing exception information -->
      <serviceDebug includeExceptionDetailInFaults="true" />

    </behavior>
  </serviceBehaviors>
</behaviors>

Client Config:

  <system.serviceModel>
<bindings>
  <wsHttpBinding>
    <binding name="WSHttpBinding_IFacadeService" closeTimeout="00:01:00"
        openTimeout="00:01:00" receiveTimeout="00:1:00" sendTimeout="00:01:00"
        bypassProxyOnLocal="false" transactionFlow="false" hostNameComparisonMode="StrongWildcard"
        maxBufferPoolSize="52428800" maxReceivedMessageSize="6553600"
        messageEncoding="Text" textEncoding="utf-8" useDefaultWebProxy="true"
        allowCookies="false">
      <readerQuotas maxDepth="2147483647" maxStringContentLength="2147483647" maxArrayLength="2147483647"
          maxBytesPerRead="2147483647" maxNameTableCharCount="2147483647" />
      <security mode="None">          
      </security>
    </binding>
  </wsHttpBinding>
</bindings>
<client>
  <endpoint address="http://esf2.facade.testpe.pg.local/FacadeWcf/FacadeService.svc"
      binding="wsHttpBinding" bindingConfiguration="WSHttpBinding_IFacadeService"
      contract="FacadeServiceReference.IFacadeService" name="WSHttpBinding_IFacadeService">
    <identity>
      <servicePrincipalName value="lrsdomain/PensionDev" />
    </identity>
  </endpoint>
</client>

Answer 1

I have figured out the basic cause of the issue and a work-around, however additional insight would be great.

The DataSet was getting serialized in XML format by WCF. I forced the DataSet to serialize as a byte[] and the time reduced to 4 seconds. One guess is that escaping all of the characters in 4MB of XML so that the HTTP communication was valid is what caused the problem.

Answer 2

You didn't increase the size of the various parameters on the server side, it seems - you should definitely try that! Use the binding configuration from your client config file on the server side as well - the service might well be choking since it's still defaulting to 64K message size.

Also, the receiveTimeout in your client binding is a bit funny - it's missing a zero digit:

<binding name="WSHttpBinding_IFacadeService" 
receiveTimeout="00:1:00" 

You should use receiveTimeout="00:01:00"

Marc