CODEWITHSUNDEEP
wcf
Otávio Décio
Otávio Décio

Reputation: 74260

Maximum binary contents length over WCF/Http

We have a WCF service that has a threshold of 30MB to send files over an http message, anything above that value gets transferred by file copy and the path sent back to the caller. Now we were requested to eliminate that file copy because customers complained it was too slow. So the decision was to remove any size limitation when sending binary content over WCF/HTTP.

My question is - how reliable is that? What type of issues will we encounter by pushing, say, a 2GB file over the wire in a single WCF message, if that is even possible?

Thanks!

Upvotes: 0

Views: 345

Answers (1)

plmw
plmw

Reputation: 321

If you set the MaxReceivedMessageSize in WCF to a high enough value on your WCF service, you can push a fairly large file through that service. The maximum is int64.MaxValue = 9,223,372,036,854,775,807, so you should be able to set a value to cover a 2GB message.

You might want to control the MaxBufferSize to ensure you're not trying to store too much into memory, and maybe consider switching to the more binary-efficient MTOM message encoding if you can. Note that the MaxReceivedMessageSize governs the size of the message after the binary file has been encoded, which means the original binary file size which can be sent over the service will be smaller than 2GB.

MSDN has a very nice article covering sending large amounts of data over WCF and what to look out for: Large Data and Streaming.

Edit: Turns out the max value allowed is actually Int64.MaxValue)

Upvotes: 3

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