I have 2 wcf services, 1 which polls the other service at regular interval.The service2 is hosted in no. of machines with the same configuration.
My problem is that whenever the poller service gets restarted, even though the service2 on other machines runs fine, i am not getting the response from those services (basically it gets timed out - getting SYSTEM.TimeOutException ). If I try to access the same service (service2) from some temp application (without restarting the service2) it gives response.
If I restart the service2, than it works fine, the service1 (poller service) gets the responses from all hosted services (Service2).
Dont know what is causing problem.
Regards,
Chirag
Attach VS to your wcf service which hangs. And find out if your connection is successful.
Do it with both services, so that you can debug the services at runtime.
If you're using a sessionful binding (netTcpBinding, wsHttpBinding), it's more than likely that you're not explicitly closing your client channel when you're done with it. This would cause the behavior you see, because the session takes a minute or so to time out if you don't explicitly close it, and the default max number of sessions is low (10)- the server will let new sessions stack up until old ones close. You can also adjust the service throttle on the server side binding to increase the max number of open sessions allowed, but you really should make sure your clients are getting cleaned up properly first.
Related
Good time of day. I would like to know how to properly connect in a WCF application. In other words, it should be created when the app is launched and be active throughout the entire operation? Or do you need to create a connection every time a service function is called? Now I have the first option, but somewhere everything is fine, and sometimes for unknown reasons I get an error: it is Impossible to use the object for communication, since it is in the failed state. There are no visible reasons for this - the code runs without errors. NetTcpBinding is used as the binding
The wcf service needs to be hosted in the process so that the client can connect to the server. As long as you are using the wcf service, you need to enable it. Faulted state means there has been an unexpected exception on the server side, so you need to use a try…catch block. Another possibility is that the channel has expired. The default timeout period of the WCF service is 10 minutes. If the client does not communicate with the server within 10 minutes, the channel will be closed. You need to recreate the channel to call the service.
We observed the following behavior on one of the servers hosting a WCF service on IIS 6.0:
The IIS log shows a high value for time-taken (> 100000)
The HTTP status code is 200
sc-win32-status code shows a value of 64
I found out that sc-win32-status code of 64 indicates "The specified network is no longer available"
Initially I suspected that it could be because of limits set on MinFileBytesPerSecond, which sets the minimum throughput rate that HTTP.sys enforces when sending data from the client to the server, and back from the server to the client.
But the value for sc-bytes and cs-bytes indicate that the amount of data is sent is within the range generally observed for the service.
Also note that the WCF service is hosted on four boxes and is load-balanced, but the problem occurs only one of the servers. (but not essentially on the same server). The problem is also intermittent.
Has anybody else encountered this error? Any clues about what could be wrong?
Update
Note: Observation on IIS 7.5 (IIS version does not really matter)
I was able to replicate the issue. The issue occurs if:
1. The WCF service takes a long time to respond
2. The client proxy times out before it receives a response from the server. In this case it leads to TimeoutException on the client.
3. The server keeps waiting for TCP ACK for the client, which it would never receive.
Hence a long timeout (TCP socket timeout (default value: 4 minutes) and sc-win32-status of 64
So essentially it appears that WCF code is taking a long time to respond and the client is timing out, what I observe in IIS log is just a symptom and not a problem.
The behavior you are describing will also occur if you exceed a WCF service's max sessions, calls or instances (depending on how you have your service instancecontext mode configured). If you observe the System.ServiceModel performance counters for %max concurrent sessions and/or %max concurrent calls (again depending on your service's instance context), you may see a correlation with the IIS log entries.
Note that these maxes can be configured in the service throttling behavior.
https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/vstudio/system.servicemodel.description.servicethrottlingbehavior(v=vs.100).aspx
I saw your question again and wanted to point out that I found a solution for this. It turned out to be this piece of code in the web.config:
<pages smartNavigation="true">
After turning this off I stopped receiving the same time-out errors. See also the answer here
IIS put the services into sleep to save recources.
Copied from here (WCF REST Service goes to sleep after inactivity)
The application pool hosting your service defines Idle Time-out property (advanced settings of app pool in IIS management console) which defaults to 20 minutes. If no request is received by the app pool within idle timeout the worker processes serving the pool is terminated. After receiving a new request the IIS must start the process again, the process must load application domain and all related assemblies, compile .svc file, run the service host and process the request.The solution can be increasing idle time-out but the meaning of this time-out is correct handling of server resources. If the process is not needed it should be stopped. Another ugly workaround is using some ping process (for example cron job or scheduled task on the server) which will regularly ping call some method on the service or page in the same application.
I have already asked a similar question here: WCF Service calling an external web service results in timeouts in heavy load environment but I've got a better idea now as to what's happening so posting a new question.
This is what is happening:
.NET client sends multiple requests at the same time to a WCF service (if it helps - I'm replicating this scneario by using Visual Studio Load Tests)
The client has got a "sendTimeout" set to 5 seconds
The WCF service receives it and start processing it. The processing involves sending a request to an external service which could take about 1 second to come back with a response
This is where I think the problem is: the client has sent many requests to the service and since the service is still busy processing the concurrent requests, some of the reqeusts from the client are timing out after 5 seconds
I have tried the following:
Changed the InstanceContextMode to PerCall
Increased the values of maxConcurrentCalls & maxConcurrentInstances
Increased the value of connectionManagement.maxconnection in machine.config
But none of that seems to be making any difference. Does anyone has any idea how can I ensure that I don't run into this timeout issue?
OK, you say WCF and that is not enough. What binding are you using and where are you hosting it? If you are using IIS, the could be different underlying problem than self-hosting.
The likely reason is the small number of ThreadPool size. You can use ThreadPool.SetMaxThreads() to change this but beware this is a sensitive value. Have a look here.
Check out the following link:
http://weblogs.asp.net/paolopia/archive/2008/03/23/wcf-configuration-default-limits-concurrency-and-scalability.aspx
I'm not sure what you're trying to achieve. Since the WCF service is doing a time consuming operation, you can't overload it and expect it to function. You can do the following (check the link about to set the following):
Increase the receiving capacity of the wcf service
Increase the send timeout of the service
Increase the send timeout of the client
Increase the receive timeout of the client
Limit the outgoing connections to the wcf service
The best and most robust option would be to configure and use MSMQ with the WCF service.
I have two windows services. One ('server') acts as a WCF host to which the other ('client') connects. So I have configured a dependency from client to server. Both are also set up to start automatically.
When I start these services by hand, everything works fine. When I stop both services and tell client to start, then server will be started before client and all is fine.
However, when I reboot the machine only server is started.
When I add a diagnostic listener I see it got a TimeoutException with the helpful message:
The HTTP request to 'http://[server address]' has exceeded the allotted timeout of 00:00:00. The time allotted to this operation may have been a portion of a longer timeout.
At some other SO question there was an answer that claims WCF is probably confused about what went wrong and therefore starts lying about the timeout.
Did I perhaps miss a dependency for either service? Does WCF require something that hasn't or is being started when client is trying to contact server?
I think you should check your client service. On startup windows services are starting while network devices are still being initialized. Services should be ready to start without network and without any network device. Usual approach is to keep periodic retries to establish connection. You can do little experiment on your machine by uninstalling all network adapters and trying to start up your services.
Additional quick workaround you can do is to setup recovery options on your service -- for example you can configure it to restart service on crash after some timeout -- you can do this through UI in services.msc or in command line using 'sc config' command.
Configuring the dependency between the two Windows Services is not necessarily sufficient to avoid there being a race condition: i.e. to avoid the client service calling the WCF service before the server's WCF channel stack is fully initialised.
The service dependency just ensures that the Windows Service Control Manager won't start the client service process before the server Windows Service has notified the SCM that it has started. Whether this is sufficient depends on how you write the server.
If the server service starts a new thread on which to initialize the WCF stack, your OnStart method is probably returning before the WCF stack is ready for clients. There is then a race condition as to whether the client's first call will succeed.
On the other hand, if the server service does not return from OnStart (and thus doesn't notify the SCM that it has started) until the channel stack is fully open, the dependency removes the race condition, but there is a different pitfall: you need to beware that the SCM's own timeout for starting the Windows service is not triggered while waiting for the WCF stack to initialise, as might well happen on a reboot if the WCF service depends on the network stack, for example. If the server's OnStart does not return within the SCM's timeout, the SCM will not try to start the dependent client service at all, because it does not receive the server's start notification. (There will be a message in the Windows event log from the SCM saying that the server service didn't start within the expected time.) You can extend the SCM timeout by calling ServiceBase.RequestAdditionalTime while the WCF service is being initialised.
Either way, the client service really ought to be written so that it doesn't fail completely if the first WCF call doesn't succeed.
You don't actually say what binding you are using. If client and server services are always running on the same machine, as you seem to indicate, then consider using the NetNamedPipeBinding: then your service won't be dependent on initialization of networking resources and startup should be quicker.
I have a fairly straightforward WCF service that performs one-way file synchronization for a bunch of smart clients. I've noticed that when there's a network or service interruption during a call, the client stops being able to communicate with the server until the entire application is restarted.
The service runs with BasicHttpBinding and is hosted with IIS6 (a .svc page), using transferMode="Streamed" and messageEncoding="Mtom". The service is configured to use the default InstanceContextMode (I think it's Per Call?) and ConcurrencyMode=Single. It's using the default throttling behavior, but I'm in an isolated test environment that nobody else is hitting.
Clients are Windows Services. I'm using this ServiceProxyHelper to ensure connections are Close()'d or Abort()'d correctly when Dispose()'d, though there are no sessions so I don't think that even matters. When an error occurs, the Client object is disposed and then goes out of scope. After the exception is detected, the service waits a bit, then creates a new client object and tries again. So it should recover from the failure, but for some reason all subsequent calls to the service fail.
I can reproduce this reliably by starting a client, allowing it to transfer a few files, then iisresetting the server. First the client generally displays a "Service is Too Busy" error (which maps to the IIS 503 error that you get during an app restart). After that, all subsequent calls to the service time out. As far as I can tell the calls are not even being attempted by the client. I have tracing enabled and what I see is: Timeout error, followed by a "Failed to send request message over HTTP" warning, followed by another Timeout error.
The crazy thing is that when I configure the client to use Fiddler (port 8888) as a proxy in app.config, everything works as desired. So somehow Fiddler as the proxy is closing or finalizing some kind of connection that WCF on its own is not.
Thoughts?
Edit 2009-10-30 8:54PM: Changed service attributes to: InstanceContextMode=Single and ConcurrencyMode=Multiple. No difference.
Well that was painful. It took me forever but finally I zeroed in on the difference between running with a proxy vs without and started poking around the <system.net> settings. It turns out that adding this configuration bit to the client fixes the problem:
<system.net>
<settings>
<servicePointManager expect100Continue="false" />
</settings>
</system.net>
Can somebody explain what's going on? Why should this setting cause WCF clients to hang irreparably when there's a service interruption?
Are you sure this isn't a client side issue. If your Windows service is making the WCF calls on a seperate thread from the main, and you have an un-handled exception happening on the child thread...the calling thread may or may not sit there and wait forever becaues it's waiting for that thread to return.
That would explain why there's an Exception inside the service and then it looks like the service makes no more calls to the service...it's hung.
Used to be a huge issue when using Timers to spawn processes in .NET 2.0 Windows Services.