Best suite for this ??? WCF or WinSock

[Aruna]

I got a requirement to build an application for real-time
communication. The architecture like this.

Consists with 4 intranets which has 4 servers and that 4 servers
interconnected via a private network.
That server accepts requests from their local network and some other
outside data sources.
The application should redirect that requests come to servers to
appropriate network.
The data should arrive in REAL TIME to the EndPoint.
The data can convert to XML and network is WINDOWS.
The data should store in a database also.

What would be the best option to solve this.

WCF or WinSock ???

[Rich Turner]

There are many questions here. Let me start with the obvious one to get us
going:

Define real-time.

To an embedded systems developer, real-time is usually measured in
nano-seconds. To a web developer, real-time is often measured in seconds.

In order to ensure success, you need your customer to define realistic
requirements around how long (min, max, avg) a given endpoint should take to
respond to each type of request. You should take into account how long it'll
take to get the data to/from the DB and how long it'll take to serialize the
data to/from the wire.

Then consider what kind of network you're going to be running on - 100mbps?
1Gb? 10Gb? Switched or hub?

Now consider how many concurrent messages will be in flight at any moment in
time and how many (max) may be simultaneously targetting each service
endpoint in the system.

It's easy to make any system deliver high performance when there's little
traffic on the network but when you reach saturation points, you often find
messages queueing as the servers processing those messages strain under the
workload.

You need to understand the above ***BEFORE*** you decide whether to build
your system out of sockets or WCF.

Chance are, however, that because you're going to be reading/writing data
to/from a DB, that your transport costs are likely to be dwarfed compared to
the costs of hitting the DB.

I cover a lot of this kind of subject-matter in my earlier posts on Indigo
which still stand true today. See some of the earlier posts on my old blog
(http://blogs.msdn.com/richardt) for more background.

-- Rich Turner (http://www.bitcrazed.com) --