Article: A Performance Comparison of Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) with Existing Distributed Communication Technologies

This article provides a high-level performance comparison between Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) and existing Microsoft .NET distributed communication technologies.

Contents
1. Introduction
2. Goals
3. Comparisons
3.1 ASP .NET Web Services (ASMX)
3.1.1 IIS Hosted Interoperable Basic Profile 1.0 Web Service
3.1.2 IIS Hosted Interoperable Basic Profile 1.0 Web Service using Transport Security
3.2 Web Services Enhancements (WSE)
3.2.1 IIS Hosted Interoperable Web Service using WS-Security
3.3 .NET Enterprise Services (ES)
3.3.1 Self-Hosted Request/Reply TCP Application
3.3.2 Self-Hosted Secure Request/Reply TCP Application
3.3.3 Secure Transacted Request/Reply TCP Application
3.4 .NET Remoting
3.4.1 Request/Reply Named Pipe Application
4. Conclusion
5. Appendix
5.1 Description of Bindings
5.2 Performance Test Machine Configuration
6. References
7. About the Author
8. Acknowledgements



Conclusion
When migrating distributed applications written with ASP.NET Web Services, WSE, .NET Enterprise Services and .NET Remoting to WCF, the performance is at least comparable to the other existing Microsoft distributed communication technologies. In most cases, the performance is significantly better for WCF over the other existing technologies. Another important characteristic of WCF is that the throughput performance is inherently scalable from a uni processor to quad processor.

To summarize the results, WCF is 25%—50% faster than ASP.NET Web Services, and approximately 25% faster than .NET Remoting. Comparison with .NET Enterprise Service is load dependant, as in one case WCF is nearly 100% faster but in another scenario it is nearly 25% slower. For WSE 2.0/3.0 implementations, migrating them to WCF will obviously provide the most significant performance gains of almost 4x.

Read the article here: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb310550.aspx