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How to troubleshoot MaxConcurrentSessions exceeded in IIS hosted WCF Service

I'm way out of my comfort zone so bear with me on providing the relevant information. We have just moved a IIS hosted WCF service to a new server and clients calling this service started experiencing timeouts. It does ok for about 10 minutes after recycling the app pool and then everything begins timing out. We enabled WCF tracing where I can see that its saying the MaxConcurrentSessions has been exceeded. The documentation says that value defaults to 2 x [# of processors] so it should be 200 for us.
The server is behind a load balancer, but is currently the only server. We notice the connections hang out at around 6 per second in Performance Monitor but will climb up to around 30 when the timeouts happen and continue climbing up from there.
The clients are connecting using a wsHttpBinding TransportWithMessageCredential security. The service validates the credentials provided in the message using the asp.net membership provider in a custom UserNamePasswordValidator configured for use on the server binding behavior. The clients do not enable reliableSession on their bindings. The service uses the default SessionMode and InstanceContextMode which I believe are Allowed and PerSession respectively? We do not call Close on the service proxies because in past investigation, I've found this only sets a flag on the option preventing it from being re-used and ours always go out of scope anyway...but now doing testing to see if this does close the connection.
If I'm interpreting the WCF trace log correctly (and I don't understand the majority of what I'm reading there) it appears we are processing around 30-40 messages per minute and that each request is completed in less than 300ms (usually much less, on rare occasions nearly 1s.) I determined the number of messages by counting the Processing message n messages over a few 1 min spans. So if we're getting 40 per minute and it takes 100s for those connections/sessions to timeout and close, we would still only have about 68 open at once before the first ones begin to time out. Not close to the 200 limit. Does the connection for a single client request get more than one session?
The strange thing is we didn't have any timeouts before and copied the service and web.config straight over to the new server. I believe the server and IIS versions were upgraded (server 2016, IIS 10.) Can you please help me identify and provide the relevant information to track down the problem causing these timeouts?
Edit:
From my reading, everything seems to indicate that the client must call Close otherwise the server will leave the connection open until it times out. However, in our test, we see one connection created in perf. mon. but it remains open after Close has been called anyway. So I can't determine if the need to call close is a rumor or if we are misinterpretting our monitoring. The real test would be to call Close everywhere and see if it eliminates our timeouts.
After increasing our MaxConcurrentSessions to 400, in performance monitor, we saw the number of concurrent sessions and instances steadily rise by about 1 per second up to about 225 where it finally leveled off and it's hovering around there. So it seems like sessions are not being closed.

Well we figured it out. There was nothing that just popped up and told us what the problem was and it took a lot of brain storming, but here's what we did:
Enabled WCF tracing. Went through the traces and was able to understand enough to basically see that the traffic didn't look out of the ordinary. All of the events seemed to be for the expected amount and types of service calls. Viewing in svctraceviewer, It didn't seem to be a DOS attack or anything like that. We just used the default configuration from that link, but it looks like it can be very customized to provide the specific information you're after if you know what that is.
What really helped in this case was finding the WCF Performance Counters. Initially we were using ASP.NET performance counters to look at sessions open which was not the right metric. This codeproject guide helped us enable the WCF performance counters to give us an insight into the number of sessions and the limit in real time.
It also helped to brush up on how WCF sessions and instances are related as well as creation of a security context:
https://www.codeproject.com/Articles/188749/WCF-Sessions-Brief-Introduction
http://webservices20.blogspot.com/2009/01/wcf-performance-gearing-up-your-service.html
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/previous-versions/dotnet/netframework-4.0/hh273122(v=vs.100)
We were able to see the percentage of the max WCF sessions being used, and observed it climbing higher and higher towards the default limit of 200 (100 per processor) but eventually level off between 150 and 200. This leveling off, together with far more sessions existing at a given time than the average number of requests per minute seen in our WCF tracing, indicated that sessions were closing but seemed to be remaining open until they timed out rather than closing as soon as the server completed the request.
Somewhere on Stack Overflow, that I've been unable to find, I once asked about the purpose of the [ClientBase<TChannel>.Close][4] method (a.k.a. the close method of a WCF service proxy) and, somewhat incorrectly, came to the conclusion that all it did is set a flag on the proxy object marking it closed so that it couldn't be used again. The documentation's description of the method seems in line with that:
Causes the ClientBase<TChannel> object to transition from its current
state into the closed state.
Well at the point that I would call Close, my references always just go out of scope anyway allowing garbage collection to clean it up so that seemed pointless. But I think a key factor was that that was regarding basicHttpBindings which are stateless. In this case, we are using wsHttpBindings which are stateful which means the server leaves keeps the session and leaves the connection open after it completes the request so that subsequent calls from the client can be made on the same connection. So, though I couldn't find any documentation or track down in the source code where it happens, it seems WCF clients must call Close on their service proxy after they make their last request in order to tell the server it can close the connection and free up that session slot. I didn't have the opportunity to look for a message sent to the server upon calling Close to do this, but we were able to observe, using the Performance Counter, the number of sessions dropping from 1 to 0 where before it would remain at 1 after our client called the service.
But we're saying a WCF client, who we may have no control over, is able to harm server performance and possibly create a denial of service if they aren't diligent in their coding and remembering to call Close and the server has no control over its own performance?? That sounds like a recipe for disaster. Well there are two things you can do on the server to mitigate this. First you can increase the max number of sessions. In our case we were hovering around 175 but occasionally under traffic spikes exceeding the 200. We bumped it up to 800 temporarily to ensure we wouldn't exceed the max. The trade-off is dedicating more server resources to holding those sessions that will probably never be used again until they time out. Luckily, the server also controls the timeout. The service can control the length these sessions are held open using the ReceiveTimeout and the InactivityTimeout. Both default to 10 minutes but the lesser of the two will be used. If you're thinking, "Receive timeout sounds wrong. That controls the amount of time the service can take to receive a large message", you're not alone. However, that's incorrect. On the server side:
ReceiveTimeout – used by the Service Framework Layer to initialize the session-idle timeout which controls how long a session can be idle before timing out.
And on the client-side it is not used. So we set our ReceiveTimeout to 30 seconds and the sessions dropped significantly. That may have actually been too low because some spots in code that do re-use the service proxy (making multiple calls in a loop for instance, or doing some data processing in between calls) are now getting an error when trying to call the service after the session has been closed. So you will have to find the right balance. But best practice, it seems, is to close your connections.
One gotcha to watch out for is using Dispose on your service proxy. I had always tried typing .dispo to see if intellisense would popup the Dispose method on my proxy and found that it didn't so assumed it didn't implement IDisposable and didn't need to be closed or disposed. It turns out it does implement IDisposable but it does it explicitly so you'd have to cast it as an IDisposable to call Dispose on it. But wait! Don't go putting your proxy in a using statement just yet. The implementation of Dispose sillily just calls Close on the proxy which will throw an exception if the proxy is in the faulted state (i.e. if a service call threw an exception). So you can't safely do something like this:
using(MyWcfClient proxy = new MyWcfClient())
{
try
{
proxy.Calculate();
}
catch(Exception)
{
}
}
because if Calculate throws an exception, the closing bracket of the using block will also throw an exception when it tries to dispose your proxy. Instead you just have to call Close after your last service method call. Evidently you can also call Abort in the catch, but I'm not sure if that actually communicates with the server to end the session.
MyWcfClient proxy = new MyWcfClient
try
{
proxy.Calculate();
proxy.Close();
}
catch(Exception)
{
proxy.Abort();
}
Addendum
We surmise the reason we started experiencing this when moving servers and were not experiencing it before is we were using Barracuda products before and are now using Oracle and perhaps the old load balancer or firewall was closing open connections for us.

KeepAlive with WCF and TCP?

I have a Windows Service hosting an advanced WCF service that communicates over TCP(netTCP) with protobuf.net, some times also with certificates.
The receiveTimeout is set to infinite to never drop the connection due to inactivity. But from what I understand the connection could be dropped anyway so I have created a simple two way keepalive service method that the client is calling every 9 min to keep the connection alive. It's very important that the connection never breaks.
Is this the correct way? Or could I simply remove my keep live because the receiveTimout is set to infinite?
Edit : Current app.config for WCF service : http://1drv.ms/1uEVKIt

No. This is widely misunderstood, and unfortunately there is much misinformation out there.
First, "Infinite" is a sort of semi-valid value. There is are two special config serializers that convert "Infinite" to either TimeSpan.MaxValue or int.MaxValue (so they're not really "infinite" anyways), but not everything in WCF seems to recognize this. So it's always best to specify your timeouts explicitly with time values.
Second, you don't need a "keepalive" method in your service, since WCF provides what's called a "reliable session". If you add <reliableSession enabled="true" /> then WCF will provide it's own keep alive mechanism through "infrastructure messages".
By having your own "keepalive" mechanism, you're effectively doubling the load on your service and you can actually create more problems than it solves.
Third, when using a reliable session, you use the inactivityTimeout setting of reliableSession. This does two things. First, it controls how frequently infrastructure (keepalive) messages are sent. They are sent at half the timeout value, so if you set it to 18 minutes, then they will be sent every 9 minutes. Secondly, if no infrastructure or operation messages (ie messages that are part of your data contract) are received within the inactivity timeout, the connection is aborted because there has likely been a problem (one side has crashed, there's a network problem, etc..).
receiveTimeout is the maximum amount of time in which no operation messages can be received before the connection is aborted (the default is 10 minutes). Setting this to a large value (Int32.MaxValue is somewhere in the vicinity of 24 days) keeps the connection tacked up, setting inactivityTimeout to a smaller value (again, the default is 10 minutes) (to a time that is smaller than 2x the maximum amount of time before network routers will drop a connection from inactivity) keeps the connection alive.
WCF handles all this for you. You can then simply subscribe to the Connection Aborted messages to know when the connection is dropped for real reasons (app crashes, network timeouts, clients losing power, etc..) and allows you to recreate the connections.
Additionally, if you don't need ordered messages, set ordered="false", as this greatly reduces the overhead of reliable sessions. The default is true.
Note: You may not receive a connection aborted event until the inactivityTimeout has expired (or you try to use the connection). Be aware of this, and set your timeouts accordingly.
Most recommendations on the internet are to set both receiveTimeout and inactivityTimeout to Infinite. This has two problems, first infrastructure messages don't get sent in a timely manner, so routers will drop the connection... forcing you to do your own keepalives. Second, the large inactivity timeout means it won't recognize when a connection legitimately drops, and you have to rely on on that ping aborting to know when a failure occurs. This is all completely unnecessary, and can in fact even make your service even more unreliable.
See also this: How do I correctly configure a WCF NetTcp Duplex Reliable Session?

C# .NET - Sending large number of small messages (over network) with minimal latency [duplicate]

This question already has answers here:
How well will WCF scale to a large number of client users?
(3 answers)
Closed 9 years ago.
I'm trying to find an optimal solution for sending large amount of small messages (usually around 1000 per sec, can be up to 10000 per sec. Each message is up to 1KB large), over the internet, but with minimal possible latency (think e.g. about financial data).
I started with basic Duplex WCF channel - that was great for local network.
Than I needed to change my contract to be oneway (OperationContractAttribute with IsOneWay property set to true), as otherwise each message waited for confirmation and so network latency was counted twice for each message.
Even after this my service still sometimes doesn't catch up (and on the server side I'm just reading messages from the queue and immediately sending, on the client side I just enqueue message after receiving and do not block).
I'm wondering if there is some overhead caused by sending large number of small messages. Is there a better way (e.g. some sort of streaming over TCP)?
Edit1:
Based on feedback I'm adding little technical info:
Our service is in Singleton instance mode that can be called concurrently ([ServiceBehavior(InstanceContextMode = InstanceContextMode.Single, ConcurrencyMode = ConcurrencyMode.Multiple)]).
We didn't configure throttling so it has default values (however there is just very few concurrent clients - 1 to 4)
In fact we use duplex channel - client calls in (registers) and then server is sending large amount of messages to client. Client itself performs very little calls. Server calls the client via callback Channel in synchronized way (we iterate through blocking queue), however very, very frequently (those mentioned ~1000 messages per sec, but even few thousands per sec).
Edit2: Explaining why this is not a duplicate to How well will WCF scale to a large number of client users? question:
In our scenario we actually have very small number of clients (let's even consider just one single client), but large number of messages being continuously sent to that one client - so it's something like streaming scenario.
We already did the measurements of typical client scenario and service throughput and found that we currently cannot scale well in some situations (for over-the-internet client at the short times in day when there is larger number of messages needed to be sent - then those are probably queued by WCF as we temporarily see increasing delay in receiving time).
Scaling out to multiple server boxes isn't unfortunately viable solution for us (one client need to be connect to one server for whole day).

How did you configured the serviceThrottling ? (see MSDN serviceThrottling)
Also please provide the InstanceContextMode configuration of your service.

Limit on open nettcpbinding connections

So I realize this is a pretty loaded question, but here's what I'm trying to gauge.
I've got a server that accepts reliable-session tcp connections via WCF and opens a callbackchannel to the client. 99.999% of the time, it's just connected, waiting for the server to issue a callback (not actively processing anything, just maintaining the connection).
What kind of per machine bottlenecks will I hit? I've already handled WCF <servicethrottling /> attributes on the binding, but just from a load/max connection/"anything else I'm missing" standpoint, I'm trying to get a sense of how many clients can be served per Azure Small Instance given that by and large, these guys will be sitting idly by, just waiting.

If you're opening outbound connections, you'll want to consider increasing
ServicePointManager.DefaultConnectionLimit
in your role OnStart() code. I can't recall the default, but I believe it's 12.
While you're at it, might as well consider setting
ServicePointManager.UseNagleAlgorithm
to false if you push lots of short messages (under, oh, 1400 bytes). Otherwise the messages get buffered up to a half-second. I gave a bit more detail on Nagle in this SO answer.

SOAP - Operation Timed Out - Rule out my server

I am using SOAP in C# .Net 3.5 to consume a web service, from a video game company. I am having lots of SOAP Exceptions with the error "Operation Timed Out"
While one process is timing out, others fly by with no problems. I would like to rule out a problem on my end, but I have no idea where to begin. My timeout is 5 minutes. For every 5,000 requests, maybe 500 fail.
Anyone have some advice for diagnosing web services failures? The web service owner will probably give no support to helping me on this, as it's a free service.
Thanks

I've had to do a lot of debugging connecting to a SOAP Service using PHP and timeouts are the worst problem. Normally the problem is the 'client' doesn't have a high enough timeout and bombs after something like 30s.
I test making the calls using SoapUI. I keep using a higher client-side timeout using that until I find something that works. Once I find that out I use the newly found time to my client and re-test.
Your only solution may be to make sure your 'clients' have a high enough timeout that will work for everything. 5 minutes should be fine for most of your server-side timeouts.

OK this is a huge question and there is a lot that it could be.
Have you tackled HTTP two connection limit? http://madskristensen.net/post/Optimize-HTTP-requests-and-web-service-calls.aspx
Have you got enough IO threads to cater for the load? Use the performance monitoring to check this for your App Pool - I think there is a IO threads counter. A quick google turned this up - http://www.guidanceshare.com/wiki/ASP.NET_2.0_Performance_Guidelines_-_Threading
Are you exhausting your bandwidth? Use performance monitoring again to check the usage of your network card.
This is a really hard subject to broach textually, as it so dependent on environment but I hop these might help.
This also looks interesting - http://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/how-to-tune-the-machineconfig-file-on-the-aspnet-platform/