Question

I’ve been badly let-down and received an application that in certain situations is at least 100 times too slow, which I have to release to our customers very soon (a matter of weeks).

Through some very simple profiling I have discovered that the bottleneck is its use of .NET Remoting to transfer data between a Windows service and the graphical front-end – both running on the same machine.

Microsoft guidelines say “Minimize round trips and avoid chatty interfaces”: write

MyComponent.SaveCustomer("bob", "smith");

rather than

MyComponent.Firstname = "bob";
MyComponent.LastName = "smith";
MyComponent.SaveCustomer();

I think this is the root of the problem in our application. Unfortunately calls to MyComponent.* (the profiler shows that 99.999% of the time is spent in such statements) are scattered liberally throughout the source code and I don’t see any hope of redesigning the interface in accordance with the guidelines above.

Edit: In fact, most of the time the front-end reads properties from MyComponent rather than writes to it. But I suspect that MyComponent can change at any time in the back-end.

I looked to see if I can read all properties from MyComponent in one go and then cache them locally (ignoring the change-at-any-time issue above), but that would involve altering hundreds of lines of code.

My question is: Are they any ‘quick-win’ things I can try to improve performance?

I need at least a 100-times speed-up. I am a C/C++/Delphi programmer and am pretty-much unfamiliar with C#/.NET/Remoting other than what I have read up on in the last couple of days. I’m looking for things that can be completed in a few days – a major restructuring of the code is not an option.

Just for starters, I have already confirmed that it is using BinaryFormatter.

(Sorry, this is probably a terrible question along the lines of ‘How can I feasibly fix X if I rule out all of the feasible options’… but I’m desperate!)

Edit 2
In response to Richard’s comment below: I think my question boils down to:

1. Is there any setting I can change to reduce the cost of a .NET Remoting round-trip when both ends of the connection are on the same machine?
2. Is there any setting I can change to reduce the number of round-trips – so that each invocation of a remote object property doesn’t result in a separate round-trip? And might this break anything?

Answer 1

Under .Net Remoting you have 3 ways of communicating by HTTP, TCP and IPC. If the commnuicatin is on the same pc I sugest using IPC channels it will speed up your calls.