Remoting (.NET 1.1) Performance Checklist

J.D. Meier, Srinath Vasireddy, Ashish Babbar, Rico Mariani, and Alex Mackman

Design Considerations

• Use .NET remoting for communicating between application domains in the same process.
• Choose the right host.
• Choose the right activation model.
• Choose the right channel.
• Choose the right formatter.
• Choose between synchronous or asynchronous communication.
• Minimize round trips and avoid chatty interfaces.
• Avoid holding state in memory.

Activation

• Use client-activated objects (CAO) only where you need to control the lifetime.
• Use SingleCall server activated objects (SAO) for improved scalability.
• Use singleton where you need to access a synchronized resource.
• Use singleton where you need to control lifetime of server objects.
• Use appropriate state management to scale the solution.

Lifetime Considerations

• Tune default timeouts based on need.

Hosts

• Use Internet Information Services (IIS) to authenticate calls.
• Turn off HTTP keep alives when using IIS.
• Host in IIS if you need to load balance using network load balancing (NLB).

Channels

• Use TcpChannel for optimum performance.
• Use the TcpChannel in trusted server scenarios.

Formatters

• Use the BinaryFormatter for optimized performance.
• Consider Web services before using the SoapFormatter.

Marshal by Reference and Marshal by Value

• Use MBR (marshal by reference) when the object state should stay in the host application domain.
• Use MBR when you need to update data frequently on the server.
• Use MBR when the size of the object is prohibitively large.
• Use MBV (marshal by value) when you need to pass object state to the target application domain.
• Use MBV when you do not need to update data on the server.
• Use small MBV objects when you need to update data frequently on the server.

Serialization and Marshaling

• Consider using a data facade.
• Marshal data efficiently and prefer primitive types.
• Reduce serialized data by using NonSerialized.
• Prefer the BinaryFormatter.

Resources

• See online at http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/en-us/dnpag/html/ScaleNetCheck07.asp