CODEWITHSUNDEEP
c#wcfstreamingfilesize
Marcus
Marcus

Reputation: 5447

How many bytes transfered in WCF before I should use streaming?

I have a client application that talks to an updater service to download files. The updater service gets them from a database, then sends them to the client using WCF. At the moment, I am using WSHttpBinding so I can take advantage of the security. So the biggest file I have been downloading/sending is around 8 MB, and this works fine. I recently tried it with a file that was around 130 MB, but nothing happened on the client; the Network Usage just sat at 0%.

I assume the file is too large to transfer without streaming (maxReceivedMessageSize, etc., is equal to 209715200, so I know the settings are right for it). To fix this, I want to have the service use BasicHttpBinding so I can stream the file if it is bigger than a certain size.

My question is, at what size file should I switch over from WSHttpBinding to BasicHttpBinding and streaming? Is there some sort of standard that one should follow? Or is my logic here completely wrong anyways?

Upvotes: 3

Views: 604

Answers (2)

Doobi
Doobi

Reputation: 4842

As marc_s says, it depends on your site activity and available memory.

As a personal rule, I typically start considering streaming once the average size starts to get to around 1Mb. 5Mb is my "must stream" limit.

Upvotes: 1

marc_s
marc_s

Reputation: 754458

There's no hard rule or formula to compute this - as per usual, it depends on your circumstances.

Consider this:

  • your service typically can serve multiple callers simultaneously (depending on your throttling settings) - assume 10 or 20 simultaneous callers for now

  • if each of these callers wants to download a file, the entire file needs to be buffered in your WCF service's memory if you're not using streaming

So if 20 callers try to download a 100 MB file each at the same time, your server side machine would have to be able to use 2 GB of RAM at once. Can your server handle that besides all its other usual processes running?

With this simple calculation, you can probably make a reasonable guesstimate as to that the size limit is in your case where switching to streaming makes sense.

Upvotes: 2

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