Silverlight and WCF: strategies to optimize performance for huge quantity of data

Question

I have a SL application that is linked to a WCF service. The WCF service retrieves data from a SQL server db. Both Silverlight and WCF use BinaryEncoding to encode SOAP messages.

The WCF sends to the client a lot of data by means of method OperationContract GetAllData(). GetAllData() returns a list of ComplexData elements. The number of elements inside the list could be large. The decrease on performance stars since 3 or 4 elements. Each ComplexData object is tagged as DataContract and contains a lot of DataMember properties (about 30). These properties are of type int, boolean, string, enum and list.

Since GetAllData() goes in timeout, I would like to know how it is possible to find the bottleneck of such architecture. In particular, what are the instruments or the tricks that I could use to proceed?

Thank you in advance.

Answer 1

If you're getting a timeout exception on the client, the bottleneck is likely the code that is creating/fetching your ComplexData objects, not WCF which is simply serializing them.