Remoting (.NET 1.1) Performance Guidelines

- J.D. Meier, Srinath Vasireddy, Ashish Babbar, 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 CAOs only where you need to control the lifetime.
• Consider the limited scalability offered by CAOs.
• 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.
• Use SingleCall SAOs for high scalability.

Channels

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

DataSets and Remoting

• Improve DataSet serialization efficiency.

Formatters

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

Hosts

• Use IIS to authenticate calls.
• Turn off HTTP keep-alives when using IIS.
• Host in IIS if you need to load balance using NLB.

Lifetime Considerations

• Tune Default Timeouts Based on Need.
• Consider using a longer lease time for objects that are expensive to create.
• Consider shorter lease times for objects that consume lots of shared or important resources.

MarshalByRef vs. MarshalByValue

• Use MBR 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 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.