We are building an extranet loan status check website using ASP.NET MVC with a WCF backend. Its a pretty standard design with the MVC site using a WCF service reference to get customer objects. The ervice uses an Oracle backend + http binding, and won't be hosted on the same server as the MVC site (so we can't use tcp binding to reduce latency).
The problem we encountered is that every call to the service is resulting in a 7-8s response time which is unacceptable for an extranet site and much higher than the 2s magic mark. The service method(s) call 12 stored procedures to create the customer object. The database is, unfortunately, denormalized (we can't change it as its also used by other inhouse production systems) so most of the calls are basic select statements which populate the customer object and its associated objects. The service proxy is properly opened and closed/disposed in the MVC actions so there are no instances of any service connection leaks. A new client proxy is created for every request (i.e., we are not using the singleton pattern for the service).
Any ideas how we can speed this up ?
Thanks
Until you accurately measure what is really happening, don't be too quick to assume where the bottleneck is.
You really need to do an Oracle extended SQL trace to see where that slowness is coming from. Anything other than that is mostly guesswork. Here is a paper from Cary Millsap (of Method R and formerly of Hotsos) that you can download that details doing this: