wcf oneway non blocking operation - c#

I need such scenario: client sends message to server, not waiting for response, and don't care, if message was send properly.
using(host.RemoteService client = new host.RemoteService())
{
client.Open();
cliend.SendMessage("msg");
}
in scenario when firewall is on, or there is no connection to the internet, client dies at "SendMessage". I mean program stops to respond. I wish program don't care about the result. I mean if there is no connection, i wish program to go further, omitting "SendMessage" or sth like that.
What should I do, is there any solution for non blocking method?

Try something like this in your service contract:
[OperationContract(IsOneWay=true)]
void Send(string message);
See the following link:
One Way Operation in WCF
Edit: OP was already using my suggested solution.
Suggested approaches to solve the issue - taken from MSDN (One-Way Services):
Clients Blocking with One-Way Operations
It is important to realize that while some one-way applications return
as soon as the outbound data is written to the network connection, in
several scenarios the implementation of a binding or of a service can
cause a WCF client to block using one-way operations. In WCF client
applications, the WCF client object does not return until the outbound
data has been written to the network connection. This is true for
all message exchange patterns, including one-way operations; this
means that any problem writing the data to the transport prevents the
client from returning. Depending upon the problem, the result could
be an exception or a delay in sending messages to the service.
You can mitigate some of this problem by inserting a buffer between
the client object and the client transport's send operation. For
example, using asynchronous calls or using an in-memory message
queue can enable the client object to return quickly. Both
approaches may increase functionality, but the size of the thread pool
and the message queue still enforce limits.
It is recommended, instead, that you examine the various controls on
the service as well as on the client, and then test your application
scenarios to determine the best configuration on either side. For
example, if the use of sessions is blocking the processing of messages
on your service, you can set the
System.ServiceModel.ServiceBehaviorAttribute.InstanceContextMode
property to PerCall so that each message can be processed by a
different service instance, and set the ConcurrencyMode to
Multiple in order to allow more than one thread to dispatch messages
at a time. Another approach is to increase the read quotas of the
service and client bindings.

Modify your attribute
[OperationContract(IsOneWay=true)]

Related

Implementing client callback functionality in WCF

The project I'm working on is a client-server application with all services written in WCF and the client in WPF. There are cases where the server needs to push information to the client. I initially though about using WCF Duplex Services, but after doing some research online, I figured a lot of people are avoiding it for many reasons.
The next thing I thought about was having the client create a host connection, so that the server could use that to make a service call to the client. The problem however, is that the application is deployed over the internet, so that approach requires configuring the firewall to allow incoming traffic and since most of the users are regular users, that might also require configuring the router to allow port forwarding, which again is a hassle for the user.
My third option is that in the client, spawns a background thread which makes a call to the GetNotifications() method on server. This method on the server side then, blocks until an actual notification is created, then the thread is notified (using an AutoResetEvent object maybe?) and the information gets sent to the client. The idea is something like this:
Client
private void InitializeListener()
{
Task.Factory.StartNew(() =>
{
while (true)
{
var notification = server.GetNotifications();
// Display the notification.
}
}, CancellationToken.None, TaskCreationOptions.LongRunning, TaskScheduler.Default);
}
Server
public NotificationObject GetNotifications()
{
while (true)
{
notificationEvent.WaitOne();
return someNotificationObject;
}
}
private void NotificationCreated()
{
// Inform the client of this event.
notificationEvent.Set();
}
In this case, NotificationCreated() is a callback method called when the server needs to send information to the client.
What do you think about this approach? Is this scalable at all?
For each client you are going to hold a thread on the server. If you have a few hundred clients and the server wouldn't use the memory anyway, that may be fine. If there can be more clients, or you do not wish to burn 1MB of stack per client, you should make some changes:
Use an async WCF action method. They allow you to unblock the request thread while the method is waiting.
Change the event model to an async once. SemaphoreSlim has async support. You can also use TaskCompletionSource.
That way you can scale up to many connections.

RabbitMQ in a WCF webservice, model usage and performance

I need to call a RabbitMQ RPC Service from within a C# WCF Web service hosted in IIS.
We have this working OK, but being a good little soldier I was reading the RabbitMQ client documentation and it states the following "IModel should not be shared between threads".
My understanding is that in RabbitMQ an IModel is actually a socket connection.
this would mean that for every call the WCF service makes it's needs to create an IModel and dispose of it once completed.
This would seem to me to be somewhat excessive on performance and socket usage and I am wondering if my understanding is actually correct, or if there are other options available like using a connection pool of IModels between threads.
Any suggestions would be gratefully received. Here's a sample of the code I'm using below, the rabbitMQ connection is actually initialized in the Global.asax, I just have it there to you can see the usage.
var connectionFactory = new ConnectionFactory();
connectionFactory.HostName = "SampleHostName";
connectionFactory.UserName = "SampleUserName";
connectionFactory.Password = "SamplePassword";
IConnection connection = connectionFactory.CreateConnection();
// Code below is what we actually have in the service method.
var model = connection.CreateModel();
using (model)
{
model.ExchangeDeclare("SampleExchangeName", ExchangeType.Direct, false);
model.QueueDeclare("SampleQueueName", false, false, false, null);
model.QueueBind("SampleQueueName", "SampleExchangeName", "routingKey" , null);
// Do stuff, like post messages to queues
}
IModel is actually a socket connection
This is incorrect. IConnection represents a connection :) Model was introduced in order to allow several clients to use the same tcp connection. So Model is a "logical" connection over a "physical" one.
One of tasks Model does is splitting and re-assembling large messages. If message exceeds certain size, it is split into frames, frames are labeled and are assembled back by receiver. Now, imagine that 2 threads send large messages... Frame numbers will be messed up, and you will end up with Frankenstein message which consists of random parts of 2 messages.
You are right assuming that Model creation have some cost. Client sends a request to server to create a model, server creates a structure in memory for this model, and sends model Id back to the client. It is done over tcp connection which is already open, so no overhead due to establishing connection. But there is still some overhead because of network round trip.
I'm not sure about WCF binding, but base rabbit's .net library does not provide any pooling for models. If it is a problem in your case, you'll have to come up with something on your own.
You need a single IModel object for each session. This is pretty normal for network-based API's. For example the Azure Table Storage client is exactly the same.
Why, well you can't have a single Channel with multiple concurrent communication streams running over them.
I would expect that a certain level of caching to occur (e.g. DNS) which would reduce the overhead of creating subsequent IModel instances.
Performance is alright when doing the same thing with Azure Tables so it should be perfectly fine with IModel. Only attempt to optimise this when you can prove you have a real need.

Suggestions for developing a TCP/IP based message client

I've got a server side protocol that controls a telephony system, I've already implemented a client library that communicates with it which is in production now, however there are some problems with the system I have at the moment, so I am considering re-writing it.
My client library is currently written in Java but I am thinking of re-writing it in both C# and Java to allow for different clients to have access to the same back end.
The messages start with a keyword have a number of bytes of meta data and then some data. The messages are always terminated by an end of message character.
Communication is duplex between the client and the server usually taking the form of a request from the Client which provokes several responses from the server, but can be notifications.
The messages are marked as being on of:
C: Command
P: Pending (server is still handling the request)
D: Data data as a response to
R: Response
B: Busy (Server is too busy to handle response at the moment)
N: Notification
My current architecture has each message being parsed and a thread spawned to handle it, however I'm finding that some of the Notifications are processed out of order which is causing me some trouble as they have to be handled in the same order they arrive.
The duplex messages tend to take the following message format:
Client -> Server: Command
Server -> Client: Pending (Optional)
Server -> Client: Data (optional)
Server -> Client: Response (2nd entry in message data denotes whether this is an error or not)
I've been using the protocol for over a year and I've never seen the a busy message but that doesn't mean they don't happen.
The server can also send notifications to the client, and there are a few Response messages that are auto triggered by events on the server so they are sent without a corresponding Command being issued.
Some Notification Messages will arrive as part of sequence of messages, which are related for example:
NotificationName M00001
NotificationName M00001
NotificationName M00000
The string M0000X means that either there is more data to come or that this is the end of the messages.
At present the tcp client is fairly dumb it just spawns a thread that notifies an event on a subscriber that the message has been received, the event is specific to the message keyword and the type of message (So data,Responses and Notifications are handled separately) this works fairly effectively for Data and response messages, but falls over with the notification messages as they seem to arrive in rapid sequence and a race condition sometimes seems to cause the Message end to be processed before the ones that have the data are processed, leading to lost message data.
Given this really badly written description of how the system works how would you go about writing the client side transport code?
The meta data does not have a message number, and I have not control over the underlying protocol as it's provided by a vendor.
The requirement that messages must be processed in the order in which they're received almost forces a producer/consumer design, where the listener gets requests from the client, parses them, and then places the parsed request into a queue. A separate thread (the consumer) takes each message from the queue in order, processes it, and sends a response to the client.
Alternately, the consumer could put the result into a queue so that another thread (perhaps the listener thread?) can send the result to the client. In that case you'd have two producer/consumer relationships:
Listener -> event queue -> processing thread -> output queue -> output thread
In .NET, this kind of thing is pretty easy to implement using BlockingCollection to handle the queues. I don't know if there is something similar in Java.
The possibility of a multi-message request complicates things a little bit, as it seems like the listener will have to buffer messages until the last part of the request comes in before placing the entire thing into the queue.
To me, the beauty of the producer/consumer design is that it forces a hard separation between different parts of the program, making each much easier to debug and minimizing the possibility of shared state causing problems. The only slightly complicated part here is that you'll have to include the connection (socket or whatever) as part of the message that gets shared in the queues so that the output thread knows where to send the response.
It's not clear to me if you have to process all messages in the order they're received or if you just need to process messages for any particular client in the proper order. For example, if you have:
Client 1 message A
Client 1 message B
Client 2 message A
Is it okay to process the first message from Client 2 before you process the second message from Client 1? If so, then you can increase throughput by using what is logically multiple queues--one per client. Your "consumer" then becomes multiple threads. You just have to make sure that only one message per client is being processed at any time.
I would have one thread per client which does the parsing and processing. That way the processing would be in the order it is sent/arrives.
As you have stated, the tasks cannot be perform in parallel safely. performing the parsing and processing in different threads is likely to add as much overhead as you might save.
If your processing is relatively simple and doesn't depend on external systems, a single thread should be able to handle 1K to 20K messages per second.
Is there any other issues you would want to fix?
I can recommend only for Java-based solution.
I would use some already mature transport framework. By "some" I mean the only one I have worked with until now -- Apache MINA. However, it works and it's very flexible.
Regarding processing messages out-of-order -- for messages which must be produced in the order they were received you could build queues and put such messages into queues.
To limit number of queues, you could instantiate, say, 4 queues, and route incoming message to particular queue depending on the last 2 bits (indeces 0-3) of the hash of the ordering part of the message (for example, on the client_id contained in the message).
If you have more concrete questions, I can update my answer appropriately.

Ordered delivery with NetNamedPipeBinding using oneWay calls

Is it possible to guarantee ordered delivery with oneWay calls using namedPipe binding?
I have a WCF service/client communicating using namedPipe binding. The client is exposing a callback contract in which all the methods in the callback are marked as OneWay. Something like this
[ServiceContract(CallbackContract = typeof(IMyServiceCallback))]
public interface IMyService
{
[OperationContract]
void MyOperation();
}
public interface IMyServiceCallback
{
[OperationContract(IsOneWay=true)]
void MyCallback1();
[OperationContract(IsOneWay=true)]
void MyCallback2();
}
At the server side, the implementation of MyOperation method always calls MyCallback1 first and then MyCallback2 but I am observing that sometimes the client receives the calls in the incorrect order (MyCallback2 first and then MyCallback1).
On searching the internet I found that the order is not guaranteed with oneway operation as mentioned here and also there is something called reliableSession which ensure message ordering.
All the examples on the internet for reliable session are with TCP binding (and not a single one with NamedPipeBinding) and the tcpBinding also has a property called ReliableSession which is not present on the NetNamedPipeBinding. So I am not sure whether reliable session is expected to work with NetNamedPipeBinding or not.
Question:
Does reliable session work with namedPipeBinding? If yes, how? If no, Is there any other approach with which I can guarantee ordered delivery?
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa480191.aspx
Introduction to Reliable Messaging with the Windows Communication Foundation
...
The NetNamedPipeBinding sits on top of the Windows operating system's support for reliable message delivery and reliable streams through named pipes. Because named pipes are connection-oriented, readily support sessions, are reliable by design, and are typically not bridged, there is no need for WS-RM support in this binding.
Chances are, your messages are being delivered in the order the server sends them, and the latter is what you need to work with. The server may be running concurrently and offer no guarantee for ordered dispatch.
Then again, I could be wrong. From my link above, there are some attributes you can specify on your contract and implementation that control ordered delivery.
This question has some more information as well.

WCF service instance will not close despite only calling oneway method

I have a WCF service running inside a windows service on a remote machine.
In the WCF service's contract, I have a method that takes a long time to run set up as
[OperationContract(IsOneWay = true)]
void Update(myClass[] stuff);
Everything works fine, the method gets called, I can see what it needs to do start getting done.
The problem is when I go to close the instance of the WCF service in my code, it times out and I get:
The socket connection was aborted.
This could be caused by an error
processing your message or a receive
timeout being exceeded by the remote
host, or an underlying network
resource issue. Local socket timeout
was '00:02:00'.
I thought the one way contract allowed me to fire and move on. Is there something I am missing? If not are there workarounds for this?
The ServiceContract attribute on your service's interface definition defaults the SessionMode property to SessionMode.Allowed, i.e.,
[ServiceContract(SessionMode = SessionMode.Allowed)]
public interface IMyContract
{
[OperationContract(IsOneWay = true)]
void Update(myClass[] stuff);
}
According to Juval Lowy's Programming WCF Services,
...when the SessionMode property is
configured with SessionMode.Allowed,
it merely allows transport sessions,
but does not enforce it. The exact
resulting behavior is a product of the
service configuration and the binding
used.
Thus, if you are using the WSHttpBinding with security or reliable messaging, the NetTcpBinding, or the NetNamedPipeBinding, then the service will behave as a per-session service. This simply means that as long as the client proxy has not been closed, a session will still be in place between the service and the client. By closing the client proxy as suggested by Shiraz should fix this.
Juval's book also says this with regard to one-way operations:
If the number queued messages has
exceeded the queue's capacity, then
the client will block, even when
issuing a one-way call. However, one
the call is queued, the client is
unblocked and can continue executing,
while the service processes the
operation in the background.
So while one-way operations do allow for fire-and-forget operation, you can still run into cases where your client may block.
Your "Update" is a method on the service.
When you open the wcf client, a connection to the service remains open until you call Close (or Abort).
You are probably not calling close, and it is therefore remaining open until it timesout.

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