How to best transfer large payloads of data using wsHttp with WCF with message security
- by jpierson
I have a case where I need to transfer large amounts of serialized object graphs (via NetDataContractSerializer) using WCF using wsHttp. I'm using message security and would like to continue to do so. Using this setup I would like to transfer serialized object graph which can sometimes approach around 300MB or so but when I try to do so I've started seeing a exception of type System.InsufficientMemoryException appear.
After a little research it appears that by default in WCF that a result to a service call is contained within a single message by default which contains the serialized data and this data is buffered by default on the server until the whole message is completely written. Thus the memory exception is being caused by the fact that the server is running out of memory resources that it is allowed to allocate because that buffer is full. The two main recommendations that I've come across are to use streaming or chunking to solve this problem however it is not clear to me what that involves and whether either solution is possible with my current setup (wsHttp/NetDataContractSerializer/Message Security). So far I understand that to use streaming message security would not work because message encryption and decryption need to work on the whole set of data and not a partial message. Chunking however sounds like it might be possible however it is not clear to me how it would be done with the other constraints that I've listed. If anybody could offer some guidance on what solutions are available and how to go about implementing it I would greatly appreciate it.
Related resources:
Chunking Channel
How to: Enable Streaming
Large attachments over WCF
Custom Message Encoder
Another spotting of InsufficientMemoryException
I'm also interested in any type of compression that could be done on this data but it looks like I would probably be best off doing this at the transport level once I can transition into .NET 4.0 so that the client will automatically support the gzip headers if I understand this properly.
