We are currently working on an application that will use a WCF service. The host (the client) is using the excellent WCF Service Proxy Helper from Erwyn van der Meer.
What I would like to know… is if I open this object multiple times… will it lead to multiple (expensive) connections or will WCF manage it and pool the connections.
The reason why I want to know this is because we will be calling methods of the service at different point in time within the same web request and we currently have wrapped the instanciation of the Service proxy class within the call.
Eg.:
MyService.MyMethod1() // wraps the connection usage as well as the call to the service Any suggestions about how I would go to minimize the amount of connection while keeping the code conform with SRP would be excellent.
So? Any idea?
You should try to minimize the number of proxy objects you create. Proxies in WCF are quite expensive to set up, so creating one and calling functions on it multiple times is definitely more efficient than creating a new one for each method invocation.
The relationship between proxy objects and connections depends on the transport used. For http transports, an HTTP connection is initiated for each function invocation. For the net.tcp transport, the connection is established at Open() time and kept until a Close(). Certain binding settings (eg those supporting WS-SecureConversation) will incur extra ‘housekeeping’ connections and message exchanges.
AKAIK, none of the out-of-the-box bindings perform connection pooling.