The lifetime of an instance of a WCF service?

Question

in the process of creating a WCF service I ran into a term that\'s new to me. Basically when specifying the InstanceContextMode I have a few options, including;

Answer 1

InstanceContextMode.Single corresponds to a singleton service i.e. the service instance server side is the same for all the incoming requests.

A few comments:

• You service might be terminated by the host even if it is a singleton, that's probably the case if your service is hosted in iis
• It's the instance context which is a singleton which might be dissociated from the actual service instances (but let's keep it simple for now...)
• If an exception is not caught properly in a singleton service, it might prevent any subsequent request to succeed