remoting and smart clients

[nswan]

Hi,

I'm developing an application that will be a smart client/work with no touch deployment. I'm also creating a remoting object that will return a dataset to the smart client.

The problem is, the first call i make to the remoting object is really really slow. The actual time the remote object takes to access the data is quick as i put a trace listner either side of the data access bits. The time to transfer the dataset back to the client is really quick, it's just that first initial call can take up to 2 minutes!!

Then after you've made the call once, every call during that app's life from then on, is always really quick. Close it down, and the first call is really slow again.

I thought it was something to do with connection pooling until i put the trace listeners around that bit. Now I'm at a loss!!

Any help much appreciated

Nick

[nemaroller]

There is a tool for the .Net framework which will precompile your code for you, so it is not built on demand: ngen.exe from the .Net command prompt.

I am not sure on how much increase you will receive though, because frankly, 2 minutes sounds awfully horrible.

Running in debug mode can also seriously degrade performance because the framework has to build indexes and pointers and a bunch of other garbage. So try building the solution, and running in release mode, and see if you notice a huge increase in speed first before mucking with NGEN.exe.

NGEN.exe can make it very difficult to update and maintain deployments.

As an end note, remoting I have stayed away from since the client machines then require the .Net framework, whereas a thin client using a Web browser is always accesible.