Summary

Depending on the processing a web service performs and the number of programs that call the web service at regular intervals, improving a web service’s performance may become a critical task. In this chapter, you learned several ways to address web service performance. To begin, you learned how to use the 80/20 rule to focus your tuning efforts on the methods within your web service that are used most often. Next, you learned how to record events within the Windows event logs that you can later study to learn how programs use your service.

You then examined how to use caching to improve web service performance. As you learned, by placing a CacheDuration attribute within the Webmethod entry, you can control the length of time (in seconds) the server will cache the web service’s result. Finally, you learned how method parameters can affect cache operations.

Most programs invoke web service methods synchronously, meaning, the program will call the method and then suspend its processing until the method completes and returns a value. Depending on the processing the method performs, the amount of time the program has to wait can become considerable. In this chapter, you learned how to call web service methods asynchronously, meaning, the programs will call the web service method and not wait for the method to complete. Instead, the program will continue to perform other tasks. After the method completes its processing, the method will “call back” the client program, signaling the program that its processing is complete. The program, in turn, can then retrieve the method’s result and then continue its processing accordingly.