I'm working on shipping in a change for my lab that will hopefully help diagnose some weird channel-faulting weirdness we're seeing. There's a test application that uses DuplexChannelFactory to connect to a couple windows services, and for some reason the channels on this test application seem to be faulting quite a bit. I have plans to implement some retry logic in there, but it would be great to figure out why exactly they're faulting.
I know that channel factories and proxy objects all implement a lot of interfaces, and I've used reflector to crawl through some of them, but I haven't found anything like what I'm looking for. Is there a way to query these objects after they've faulted in order to get some information about what caused the fault?
Edit: The configuration is very basic--the binding is just the default-constructed NetTcpBinding, the service implementation has [ServiceBehavior(InstanceContextMode = InstanceContextMode.Single, ConcurrencyMode = ConcurrencyMode.Reentrant)], and no special attributes are on any of the operations in the service contract. However, I'm asking more about general techniques in diagnosing channel faults, not diagnosing this specific case. I wouldn't expect configuration specifics to have too much impact on that; if anything, the configuration details would be something returned by said diagnostics, right?
Ladislav and Shiraz answers are all good and I have gave them +1.
All I can add to them is that normally a faulted channel is the result of unhandled exception on the server. When that happens, WCF thinks that there is somethig fundamentally wrong with the server and faults the channel so that it cannot be used.
The correct approach - which I believe should have been default and come for free - is for the service to catch the exception and create a FaultException and return it (look at this form example http://www.c-sharpcorner.com/UploadFile/ankithakur/ExceptionHandlingWCF12282007072617AM/ExceptionHandlingWCF.aspx)
The reason WCF does not make as default is that it changes the contract and the WSDL so the client has to get the updated WSDL.
So if I were you, I would catch the exceptions, log them and then return a fault exception and this way I would know what the problem is and channels are not faulted.
First thing is it this test application, or are the specific services used by other clients.
Assuming that it is the test client that is causing the problem. There could be 2 problems:
Not closing proxies, therefore hitting max connections to the server.
Not aborting proxies when they are in a failed state.
Diagnostic tool you are looking for is called WCF Tracing. It usually shows why the channel has faulted. You can configure it on both client and server and use SvcTraceViewer.exe to browse collected traces.
Have you hooked on to the ICommunicationObject.OnFauled
Related
I've got a WCF service that uses reliable sessions. In my tests, I tend to open a channel, call a method and then close the channel.
I often get a The session was closed before message transfer was complete. exception during Close().
Given that my method is synchronous, the message transfer should be complete. If it's reliable sessions causing this problem (because it's still doing something under the hood), surely it's responsible for either blocking my Close() call, or for giving up without throwing an exception?
How do I avoid this exception?
You should find what caused the connection close. Add diagnostics to you server and client config files by using the WCF Service Configuration Editor.
Repro the error and open your logs in the viewer. You will probably find that the message was to large at the serverside.
I had the same problem, the solution was to change operation contract in my interface definition by marking called method as IsOneWay=false which is default setting.
Make sure you haven't change your operation contract for your method to
[OperationContract(IsOneWay=true)]
What you may want to consider is specifying a timeout value in your call to Close() to allow more time for graceful closing. This can spare you many problems. (Although I agree that finding the cause and trying to prevent it is also important).
I have a self hosted WCF 4.0 service with an HTTPS endpoint. I have method that writes some trace info after the message comes in. However, some messages are 400k in size, so there is a long wait conceivably between when WCF has it and my console app has it. How can I get a hook or interception layer in there so I can at least know when a message is first coming in?
I think there is a WCF Performance Counter related to this, so there must be some way to know...
Thanks for all ideas!
This is not the same as Detect WCF client open channel operation , this is about knowing when the HTTP traffic first comes in. Maybe its not that I need to monitor things on my WCF service, maybe I need to monitor some other WCF layer that is intercepting HTTP. Can anyone say?
What about making a custom MessageEncoder that simply wraps the default implementation, but overrides ReadMessage() and logs some information before calling the wrapped implementation (which creates a Message instance)? At this stage the full message isn't even fully streamed over the wire, hence it's a very early point of the processing pipeline. Obviously, however, you don't know anything about the message yet. But if you want to get a timestamp, that might be a convenient place to get it.
One option is implement the IDispatchMessageInspector interface for your service with your message size checking code in the AfterReceiveRequest method override. Your code should look something like the code in this blog post.
I'm having a problem where the WCF service hangs after 13-14 asynchronous process calls from the client. This occurs all the time. The client is a mobile JavaFX app. There is no specific error outputted in the server as well as in client. Someone suggested that it might be a throttling issue.
I've set the service side .config parameters maxConcurrent calls from 10 to 500
<serviceThrottling maxConcurrentCalls="500" maxConcurrentSessions="500” />
So this means, it should be able to accept more than 10 calls, right? However, it didn't resolve this issue. Still hangs on the 13-14th process call.
Only one client is connecting to this web service.
What do you think is wrong?
Do you close the client after doing your call?
When I encountered this problem, I did not close it, and the open requests blocked the service after a short time.
Edit: Ok, I know nothing about JavaFX =) The code below is C#, sorry. But you can surely do something similar.
Use either
WcfClient client = new WcfClient()
// ...
client.Close()
or
using(WcfClient client = new WcfClient()){
// ...
}
Similar problem here - I have an app calling from one process to another, locally, named pipes.
Calls are really light in code- basically takex an array of serializable objects, queues them on other side. Occasionally it hangs. Restarts afte rtimeout. no data lost, but... as the data is financial data, and the receiving app an autoamted trading system, that may result in very bad financial issues. Not been able to reproduce it yet.
This could very easily be caused by any deadlock condition in your code. If your service locks up and starts eating up 100% or CPU you have a dead lock. Create a dump file and see where your code was at.
I ran into the same issue my first WCF app it was a dictionary that i wasn't making sure was synchronized in logging code.
The SvcTraceViewer is super helpful in figuring out tough wcf
So somebody (ok it was me) didn't realize you need to close WCF proxies after using them.
How bad is this? What kind of problems can it cause.
Is there just a delay in closing resources because of garbage collection - or should I really worry about things like premature app pool recycling?
I actually have far more ASMX than WCF proxies with this issue - so the same question goes for ASMX also.
Obviously now that I know this I'm going to gradually fix it, but would appreciate input on how bad this really is?
A WCF service has a default timeout. If you do not close it, the service will wait until there is a timeout.
WCF also has a max concurrent calls, that has a default of 10.
Therefore, if you do not close your connections you can only have 10 calls per min. (assuming default settings)
Here is someone with a similar problem:
http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/wcf/thread/d58ee1c6-032b-40f3-b734-6628f3991bb2/
You can safely to reuse a WCF connection, just taking additional care to check if it's in a faulted state.
As a general guide when you are looking to gradually fix this, don't wrap your proxy's with a using statement, I've seen a lot of people do this, I was doing it until I read an article by IDesign that doing this might cause the Dispose to throw an exception and mask a real exception, explicitly close your proxy in try/catch, if close causes an exception, use Abort for resource clean up.
EDIT: As noted by the comment below this applies to WCF Proxies.
I have the standard error handing in place in my service:
I have an IErrorHandler hooked to the service to handle unexpected errors during service execution.
I have try/catch blocks in all my service methods to handle expected cases.
However, there are cases where exceptions are thrown on the server and neither is called.
Here is a case where the server exception is not sent to the IErrorHandler:
Set the receiveTimout on the server binding to 5 seconds.
On the client do this:
.
Service1Client sc = new Service1Client();
ICommunicationObject o = sc as ICommunicationObject;
o.Open(); // open channel
sc.GetData(10); // do a first call
Thread.Sleep(10000); // wait longer than the server receiveTimeout
sc.GetData(10); // Attempt another call: server throws a FaulException
In that case, the error is thrown on the server but I cannot find a way to handle it (and log it). I know an error is raised because if I attach a debugger on the server process and break on all exceptions, the debugger breaks.
I have found other similar cases where low level errors are not passed to my program.
Where can I hook my code to ensure that I can handle ALL exceptions that occur on the server before they are returned to the client app? Should I implement my own IChannel or some other low level interface?
Thanks
UPDATE Sep 21 2009: See this thread on the Microsoft WCF Forum. I'll probably have to implement my own Channel if I want to handle this type of exception. I'll update this post again when I have more info.
After much research and experimentation, the answer is:
At this time (.Net 3.5) there is no mechanism that allows one to handle all possible exceptions that may occur in the context of a WCF call.
Exceptions that happen during the service method execution can easily be handled with:
Try/catch blocks in all service methods to handle expected cases.
IErrorHandler hooked to the services to handle unexpected errors during service execution.
However, for low level WCF infrastructure errors, there is no perfect solution. The best solution that exists seems to be to implement a custom channel to catch more exceptions.
In this Microsoft Connect Bug Report, Microsoft confirms that there is no way to handle all types WCF infrastructure errors.
In this thread on the Microsoft WCF forums, there is a sample on how to implement a custom channel. That solution only works for HTTP, not for HTTPS. Also some WCF infrastructure errors are not caught by the custom channel either (see more details in that specific thread).
Use FaultContracts. Then the fault can be handled at the client end.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms732013.aspx
http://www.c-sharpcorner.com/UploadFile/ankithakur/ExceptionHandlingWCF12282007072617AM/ExceptionHandlingWCF.aspx
This is also much better for debugging, since often you will be developing a client and don't want to bring down the server for debugging purposes.
On the client end, use try/catch blocks to catch all exceptions/faults. There are definitely errors that can't be detected on the server end, such as a communication problem, so you need to handle errors on the client end anyways.
If you want centralized error handling, you can create a service that takes messages about all errors, send the error to that server, and have it log that. This can be useful if you want to create a centralized message tracing/performance analysis/logging tool and have a large number of application processors, servers, clients etc.
The point is - if the server is not reachable or can't handle the message, there won't be an error on the server - the error will pop up on the client ("TimeoutException" or others).
So in those cases, having the IErrorHandler on the server really isn't gonna help - since the error really happens on the client (no connection can be made, due to network down, or typo in server's address or sstuff like that).
So on the client side, you definitely also have to use try....catch around all your server calls.
Marc
Set up diagnostic tracing and check the logs with Service Trace Viewer Tool. Link contains information about configuring tracing as well.