How can I make the WCF server instance (the instance of the class in the .svc.cs / .svc.vb file) stay alive between requests?
It's a stateless, read-only type of service: I'm fine with different clients reusing the same instance. However, it's not thread-safe: I don't want two threads to execute a method on this instance concurrently.
Ideally, what I'm looking for is that WCF manages a "worker pool" of these instances. Say, 10. New request comes in: fetch an instance, handle the request. Request over, go back to the pool. Already 10 concurrent requests running? Pause the 11th until a new worker is free.
What I /don't/ want is per-client sessions. Startup for these instances is expensive, I don't want to do that every time a new client connects.
Another thing I don't want: dealing with this client-side. This is not the responsibility of the client, which should know nothing about the implementation of the server. And I can't always control that.
I'm getting a bit lost in unfamiliar terminology from the MSDN docs. I have a lot working, but this pool system I just can't seem to get right.
Do I have to create a static pool and manage it myself?
Thanks
PS: A source of confusion for me is that almost anything in this regard points toward the configuration of the bindings. Like basicHttp or wsHttp. But that doesn't sound right: this should be on a higher level, unrelated to the binding: this is about the worker managers. Or not?
In the event that you have a WCF service that centralizes business logic, provides/controls access to another “single” backend resource (e.g. data file, network socket) or otherwise contains some type of shared resource, then you most likely need to implement a singleton.
[ServiceBehavior(InstanceContextMode = InstanceContextMode.Single)]
In general, use a singleton object if it maps well to a natural singleton in the application domain. A singleton implies the singleton has some valuable state that you want to share across multiple clients. The problem is that when multiple clients connect to the singleton, they may all do so concurrently on multiple worker threads. The singleton must synchronize access to its state to avoid state corruption. This in turn means that only one client at a time can access the singleton. This may degrade responsiveness and availability to the point that the singleton is unusable as the system grows.
The singleton service is the ultimate shareable service, which has both pros(as indicated above) and cons (as implied in your question, you have to manage thread safety). When a service is configured as a singleton, all clients get connected to the same single well-known instance independently of each other, regardless of which endpoint of the service they connect to. The singleton service lives forever, and is only disposed of once the host shuts down. The singleton is created exactly once when the host is created.
https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/cc163590.aspx
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Presently I have one class which monitor serial ports for incoming data, process the data and raises events through delegates/events based on the received data. This is a stand alone application. Now I have to convert it to a service so that the serial port monitor class will start as a service when the windows starts and a client applications subscribes to the events from either a remote PC or from the local machine. I have seen many articles on using WCF for this kind of applications. But WCF is message based and it will create a service obect when the client is requested. But my requirement is the service should be started automatically and the client application should be able to subscribe for the events of the service class instance which is already created during startup. How can I achieve this using WCF ?
The default behavior in WCF is to create a new instance of your service class to handle each incoming request, but you can override this by decorating your class with:
[ServiceBehavior(InstanceContextMode=InstanceContextMode.Single)]
To get good performance with a Singleton, though, there's a few things you'll need to consider:
Since you'll likely need to do some configuration of your Singleton instance, you'll probably want to use the ServiceHost constructor method that takes a Singleton instance as an argument. (For an example, see Figure 8 Initializing and Hosting a Singleton in this article
Threading: The default threading model (ConcurrencyMode) only allows a single thread to have access to your Singleton instance at a time. You may need to look at using ConcurrencyMode = ConcurrencyMode.Multiple to get good performance (which means you'll need to handle threading-related issues yourself).
Make sure the methods in your Callback contract are marked as [OperationContract(IsOneWay = true)] so that publishing events back to the subscribers doesn't cause your service instance to block until the event handler completes. (Using WCF in this way is covered in detail in this article by Juval Lowy
I am trying to understand how instances with WCF works. I have a WCF service which the InstanceContextMode set to PerCall (so for each call of every client a new instance will be created) and ConcurrencyMode set to Single (so the service instance is executing exactly one or no operation call at a time).
So with this I understand that when a client connects a new instance is created. But what happens when the client leaves the service. Does the instance die. The reason I ask is because I need to implement a ConcurrentQueue in the service. So a client will connect to the service and put loads of data to be processed and then leave the service. The workers will work of the queue. After the work is finished I need the instance to be destroyed.
Basically, learning from the "WCF Master Class" tought by Juval Lowy, per-call activation is the preferred choice for services that need to scale, i.e. that need to handle lots of concurrent requests.
Why?
With the per-call, each incoming request (up to a configurable limit) gets its own, fresh, isolated instance of the service class to handle the request. Instantiating a service class (a plain old .NET class) is not a big overhead - and the WCF runtime can easily manage 10, 20, 50 concurrently running service instances (if your server hardware can handle it). Since each request gets its own service instance, that instance just handles one thread at a time - and it's totally easy to program and maintain, no fussy locks and stuff needed to make it thread-safe.
Using a singleton service (InstanceContextMode=Single) is either a terrible bottleneck (if you have ConcurrencyMode=Single - then each request is serialized, handled one after another), or if you want decent performance, you need ConcurrencyMode=Multiple, but that means you have one instance of your service class handling multiple concurrent threads - and in that case, you as a programmer of that service class must make 100% sure that all your code, all your access to variables etc. is 100% thread-safe - and that's quite a task indeed! Only very few programmers really master this black art.
In my opinion, the overhead of creating service class instances in the per-call scenario is nothing compared to the requirements of creating a fully thread-safe implementation for a multi-threaded singleton WCF service class.
So in your concrete example with a central queue, I would:
create a simple WCF per-call service that gets called from your clients, and that only puts the message into the queue (in an appropriate fashion, e.g. possibly transforming the incoming data or something). This is a quick task, no big deal, no heavy processing of any kind - and thus your service class will be very easy, very straightforward, no big overhead to create those class instances at all
create a worker service (a Windows NT service or something) that then reads the queue and does the processing - this is basically totally independent of any WCF code - this is just doing dequeuing and processing
So what I'm saying is : try to separate the service call (that delivers the data) from having to build up a queue and do large and processing-intensive computation - split up the responsibilities: the WCF service should only receive the data and put it into a queue or database and then be done with it - and a second, separate process should do the processing/heavy-lifting. That keeps your WCF service lean'n'mean
Yes, per call means, you will have a new insance of the service per each connection, once you setup the instance context mode to percall and ConcurrencyMode to single, it will be single threaded per call. when the client leaves, done with the job, your instance will dispose. In this case, you want to becareful not to create your concurrentqueue multiple times, as far as i can imagine, you will need a single concurrentqueue? is that correct?
I would recommend you to use IntanceContextMode=Single and ConcurrencyMode to Mutli threaded. This scales better.if you use this scheme, you will have a single concurrent queue, and you can store all your items within that queue.
One small note, ConcurrentQueue, has a bug, you should be aware of, check the bug database.
I have been tasked with creating a set of web services. We are a Microsoft shop, so I will be using WCF for this project. There is an interesting design consideration that I haven't been able to figure out a solution for yet. I'll try to explain it with an example:
My WCF service exposes a method named Foo().
10 different users call Foo() at roughly the same time.
I have 5 special resources called R1, R2, R3, R4, and R5. We don't really need to know what the resource is, other than the fact that a particular resource can only be in use by one caller at a time.
Foo() is responsible to performing an action using one of these special resources. So, in a round-robin fashion, Foo() needs to find a resource that is not in use. If no resources are available, it must wait for one to be freed up.
At first, this seems like an easy task. I could maybe create a singleton that keeps track of which resources are currently in use. The big problem is the fact that I need this solution to be viable in a web farm scenario.
I'm sure there is a good solution to this problem, but I've just never run across this scenario before. I need some sort of resource tracker / provider that can be shared between multiple WCF hosts.
Any ideas from the architects out there would be greatly appreciated!
Create another central service which only the web services know about. This service takes on the role of the resource manager.
All of the web services in the farm will communicate with this central service to query for resource availability and to "check out" and "check in" resources.
You could track the resource usage in a database table, which all the servers on the farm could access.
Each resource would have a record in the database, with fields that indicate whether (or since when) it is in use. You could get fancy and implement a timeout feature as well.
For troubleshooting purposes, you could also record who is using the resource.
If you record when each resource is being used (in another table), you would be able to verify that your round-robin is functioning as you expect, decide whether you should add more copies of the resource, etc.
There are any number of approaches to solving this problem, each with their own costs and benefits. For example:
Using MSMQ to queue all requests, worker processes pull messages from the queue, pass to Rn and post responses back to a response queue for Foo to dispatch back to the appropriate caller.
Using an in-memory or locally persisted message dispatcher to send the next request to an on-box service (e.g. via Named Pipes for perf) based upon some distribution algorithm of your choice.
etc.
Alas, you don't indicate whether your requests have to survive power outages, if they need to be transactionally aware, whether the callers are also WCF, how quickly these calls will be received, how long it takes for Rn to return with results, etc.
Whichever solution you choose, I strongly encourage you to split your call to Foo() into a RequestFoo() and GetFooResponse() pair or implement a WCF callback hosted by the caller to receive results asynchronously.
If you do NOT do this, you're likely to find that your entire system will grind to a halt the second traffic exceeds your resources' abilty to satisfy the workload.
I am designing a WCF service.
I am using netTCP binding.
The Service could be called from multi-threaded clients.
The multi-threaded clients are not sharing the proxy.
1. WCF Service design question.
Client has to sent these 2 values in every call: UserID and SourceSystemID. This will help the Service to identify the user and the system he belongs.
Instead of passing these 2 values in every call, I decided to have them cached with the Service for the duration of call from the client.
I decided to have a parameterized constructor for the Service and store these values in the ChannelContext as explained in this article.
http://www.danrigsby.com/blog/index.php/2008/09/21/using-icontextchannel-extensions-to-store-custom-data/
Initially I wanted to go with storing the values in the Session and have a method for initialization and termination. But there I found that I need to manually clean up the session in each case. When I am storing values in the channel context, I don’t have to clean it up every time and when the channel closes the values stored are already destroyed.
Can somebody please make sure that I am correct in my assumption?
2. Should I use SessionMode?
For my contract, I used : [ServiceContract(SessionMode = SessionMode.Required)] and without this service attribute.
Irrespective of my choice, I am always finding a value for : System.ServiceModel.OperationContext.Current.SessionId
How can this be explained?
When I say SessionMode.Required, does my InstanceContextMode automatically change to PerSession?
3. InstanceContextMode to be used?
My service is stateless except that I am storing some values in the Channel Context as mentioned in (1).
Should I use Percall or PerSession as InstanceContextMode?
The netTcp always has a transport-level session going - so that's why you always have a SessionId. So basically, no matter what you choose, with netTcp, you've got a session-ful connection right from the transport level on up.
As for InstanceContextMode - as long as you don't need anything else from a session except the SessionId - no reliable messaging etc. - then I'd typically pick Per-Call - it's more scalable, it typically performs better, it gives you less "glue" to worry about and less bits and pieces that you need to manage.
I would use an explicitly required session only if you need to turn on reliable messaging or something else that absolutely requires a WCF session. If you don't - then it's just unnecessary overhead, in my opinion.
Setting SessionMode to SessionMode.Required will enforce using bindings which support sessions, like NetTcpBinding, WSHttpBinding, etc. In fact if you try using a non-session-enabled binding , the runtime will throw an exception when you try to open the host.
Setting InstanceContextMode to PerSession means that only one instance of the service will be crated per session and that instance will serve all the requests coming from that session.
Having SessionId set by the runtime means that you might have a transport session or a reliable session or security session. Having those does not necessarily mean you have an application session , that is a single service object serving the requests per proxy. In other words, you might switch off application session by setting InstanceContextMode=PerCall forcing the creation of a new service object for every call, while maintaining a transport session due to using netTcpBinding, or a reliable or security session.
Think of the application session that is configured by InstanceContextMode and Session Mode as a higher level session, relying on a lower-level session /security, transport or reliable/. An application session cannot actually be established without having one of the other sessions in place, from there the requirement for the binding .
It is getting a bit long already, but for simple values I would recommend you to pass those values every time instead of creating application session. That will ensure the service objects have a short lifetime and no unnecessary resources will be kept alive on the server. It makes a lot sense with more clients, or proxies talking to your service. And you could always cache the values in the clients, even pass them as custom headers if you want.
I have found myself responsible for carrying on the development of a system which I did not originally design and can't ask the original designers why certain design decisions were taken, as they are no longer here. I am a junior developer on design issues so didn't really know what to ask when I started on the project which was my first SOA / WCF project.
The system has 7 WCF services, will grow to 9, each self-hosted in a seperate console app/windows service. All of them are single instance and single threaded. All services have the same OperationContract: they expose a Register() and Send() method. When client services want to connect to another service, they first call Register(), then if successful they do all the rest of their communication with Send(). We have a DataContract that has an enum MessageType and a Content propety which can contain other DataContract "payloads." What the service does with the message is determined by the enum MessageType...everything comes through the Send() method and then gets routed to a switch statement...I suspect this is unusual
Register() and Send() are actually OneWay and Async...ALL results from services are returned to client services by a WCF CallbackContract. I believe that the reson for using CallbackContracts is to facilitate the Publish-Subscribe model we are using. The problem is not all of our communication fits publish-subscribe and using CallbackContracts means we have to include source details in returned result messages so clients can work out what the returned results were originally for...again clients have a switch statements to work out what to do with messages arriving from services based on the MessageType (and other embedded details).
In terms of topology: the services form "nodes" in a graph. Each service has hardcoded a list of other services it must connect to when it starts, and wont allow client services to "Register" with it until is has made all of the connections it needs. As an example, we have a LoggingService and a DataAccessService. The DataAccessSevice is a client of the LoggingService and so the DataAccess service will attempt to Register with the LoggingService when it starts. Until it can successfully Register the DataAccess service will not allow any clients to Register with it. The result is that when the system is fired up as a whole the services start up in a cascadeing manner. I don't see this as an issue, but is this unusual?
To make matters more complex, one of the systems requirements is that services or "nodes" do not need to be directly registered with one another in order to send messages to one another, but can communicate via indirect links. For example, say we have 3 services A, B and C connected in a chain, A can send a message to C via B...using 2 hops.
I was actually tasked with this and wrote the routing system, it was fun, but the lead left before I could ask why it was really needed. As far as I can see, there is no reason why services cannot just connect direct to the other services they need. Whats more I had to write a reliability system on top of everything as the requirement was to have reliable messaging across nodes in the system, wheras with simple point-to-point links WCF reliabily does the job.
Prior to this project I had only worked on winforms desktop apps for 3 years, do didn't know any better. My suspicions are things are overcomplicated with this project: I guess to summarise, my questions are:
1) Is this idea of a graph topology with messages hopping over indirect links unusual? Why not just connect services directly to the services that they need to access (which in reality is what we do anyway...I dont think we have any messages hopping)?
2) Is exposing just 2 methods in the OperationContract and using the a MessageType enum to determine what the message is for/what to do with it unusual? Shouldnt a WCF service expose lots of methods with specific purposes instead and the client chooses what methods it wants to call?
3) Is doing all communication back to a client via CallbackContracts unusual. Surely sync or asyc request-response is simpler.
4) Is the idea of a service not allowing client services to connect to it (Register) until it has connected to all of its services (to which it is a client) a sound design? I think this is the only design aspect I agree with, I mean the DataAccessService should not accept clients until it has a connection with the logging service.
I have so many WCF questions, more will come in later threads. Thanks in advance.
Well, the whole things seems a bit odd, agreed.
All of them are single instance and
single threaded.
That's definitely going to come back and cause massive performance headaches - guaranteed. I don't understand why anyone would want to write a singleton WCF service to begin with (except for a few edge cases, where it does make sense), and if you do have a singleton WCF service, to get any decent performance, it must be multi-threaded (which is tricky programming, and is why I almost always advise against it).
All services have the same
OperationContract: they expose a
Register() and Send() method.
That's rather odd, too. So anyone calling will first .Register(), and then call .Send() with different parameters several times?? Funny design, really.... The SOA assumption is that you design your services to be the model of a set of functionality you want to expose to the outside world, e.g. your CustomerService might have methods like GetCustomerByID, GetAllCustomersByCountry, etc. methods - depending on what you need.
Having just a single Send() method with parameters which define what is being done seems a bit.... unusual and not very intuitive / clear.
Is this idea of a graph topology with
messages hopping over indirect links
unusual?
Not necessarily. It can make sense to expose just a single interface to the outside world, and then use some internal backend services to do the actual work. .NET 4 will actually introduce a RoutingService in WCF which makes these kind of scenarios easier. I don't think this is a big no-no.
Is doing all communication back to a
client via CallbackContracts unusual.
Yes, unusual, fragile, messy - if you can ever do without it - go for it. If you have mostly simple calls, like GetCustomerByID - make those a standard Request/Response call - the client requests something (by supplying a Customer ID) and gets back a Customer object as a return value. Much much simpler!
If you do have long-running service calls, that might take minutes or more to complete - then you might consider One-Way calls which just deposit a request into a queue, and that request gets handled later on. Typically, here, you can either deposit the answer into a response queue which the client then checks, or you can have two additional service methods which give you the status of a request (is it done yet?) and a second method to retrieve the result(s) of that request.
Hope that helps to get you started !
All services have the same OperationContract: they expose a Register() and Send() method.
Your design seems unusual at some parts specially exposing only two operations. I haven't worked with WCF, we use Java. But based on my understanding the whole purpose of Web Services is to expose Operations that your partners can utilise.
Having only two Operations looks like odd design to me. You generally expose your API using WSDL. In this case the WSDL would add nothing of value to the partners, unless you have lot of documentation. Generally the operation name should be self-explanatory. Right now your system cannot be used by partners without having internal knowledge.
Is doing all communication back to a client via CallbackContracts unusual. Surely sync or asyc request-response is simpler.
Agree with you. Async should only be used for long running processes. Async adds the overhead of correlation.