Client (TCP and Named Pipe) Connection Pooling

Using the TCP and Named Pipe bindings give you a very clean mapping between IDuplexSessionChannel and the underlying network resource (socket or pipe). Namely, you can effectively treat a channel as 1-1 to a socket (I will use socket as shorthand for the generic “network resource” for the remainder of this post  ).

That being said, the lifetime of the underlying socket is not necessarily 1-1 with the lifetime of the channel. Due to our connection pooling feature in WCF, a connection can be reused over the lifetime of multiple channels. We perform connection pooling for both buffered and streaming channels. Our connection pool is configurable through TcpConnectionPoolSettings/NamedPipeConnectionPoolSettings. These settings include a GroupName that we use for isolation, an upper bound on our cache size (MaxOutboundConnectionsPerEndpoint), and timeout values for reliability and NLB support

The way connection pooling works on the client is as follows:

• When you open a channel we will first look for a connection in our pool. This lookup is performed based on IP+port for sockets and based on endpoint Uri name for Pipes.
• If we find an available connection in our pool then we will attempt our open handshake using .Net Framing. If this succeeds then we will associate the connection with the new channel and return from Open. If it fails then we’ll discard the connection. If we have not yet exceeded the binding’s OpenTimeout then we will repeat the “look in pool” process.
• If no [valid] connections are found in our pool then we will establish a new connection (again, using up to the time remaining in OpenTimeout).
• When you close a channel, after we perform our close handshake we will consider returning the connection to our pool. If we already have reached MaxOutboundConnectionsPerEndpoint, or the connection’s lifetime has exceeded LeaseTimeout then we will close the connection instead. The connection that is returned to the pool is the “raw” connection (the one that was initially accepted, prior to any security upgrades). In this way we can provide a transparent pool without leaking any security or other information.

Read more: kennyw.com

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