How to achieve high-performance REST API on Azure with .NET?

Question

We have a .NET Web Role hosted on Windows Azure that only serves a REST API with only a hand few web methods.

API is u

Answer 1

Is your XML being serialized via reflection (ie. using attributes and so forth)? If so, then protobuf-net stands to be much, much faster.

In fact, though, even if your XML serialization is customized using explicit getter and setter Func<>s, you can still see some significant gain with protobuf-net. In our case, depending on the size and content of the objects being serialized, we saw 5-15% speed increases in serialization times.

Using protobuf-net will also provide a bump to available bandwidth, though that will depend on your content to a large extent.

Our system sounds pretty different from yours, but FWIW we find that WCF itself has an almost imperceptibly low overhead compared to the rest of the flow. A profiler like dotTrace might help identify just where you can save once you've switched to protobufs.