Now you might say You are using a WCF ServiceContract? Isn’t that using SOAP and doesn’t that cause ginormous overhead? No, it doesn’t. We’re using the WCF binary encoder in session mode here. That’s about as efficient as you can get it on the wire with serialized data. The per-frame SOAP overhead for net.tcp with the binary encoder in session mode is in the order of 40-50 bytes per message because of dictionary-based metadata compression. The binary encoder also isn’t doing any base64 trickery but treats binary as binary – one byte is one byte. Port Bridge is using a default frame size of 64K (which gets filled up in high-volume streaming cases due to the built-in Nagling support) and so we’re looking at an overhead of far less than 0.1%. That’s not shabby.
