response size limitaiton of a WCF web serivces

Question

I am hosting a WCF service in IIS using basicHttpBinding. The WCF web services queries back end SQL Server 2008 by using ADO.Net and return a DataTable to client side of WCF

Answer 1

There's a multitude of buffer sizes you can play with - they are kept fairly small (64K) by default in order to avoid Denial-of-service attacks, but if you need to, you can increase those:

Have a look at the "MaxBufferSize", "MaxBufferPoolSize", "MaxReceivedMessageSize" settingsin the binding, as well as the various settings in the section.

I would try to just increase the "MaxBufferSize" and "MaxBufferPoolSize" first and see if that alone helps - most of the other settings should really be more geared towards when the service receives and needs to process a message.

There are no hard limits as to how big an object can be that you serialize back. However, the DataTable does carry a significant overhead, and if you don't really need that DataTable functionality on the client side, you might also do a conversion on the server to send back just a collection or generic list of objects - instead of the heavy-lift DataTable object.

Furthermore, if you frequently send back large amounts of data, you might need to investigate the streaming capabilities of WCF, too (e.g. if you return pictures, videos, that kind of stuff). Marc