WCF; closing client

General question; WCF clients - do these (broadly) pool? My assumption
is "no".

Specifically, if I am expecting to perform additional requests
shortly, should I close the client and re-obtain when needed, or leave
it open and re-use it? I would lean towards the latter, unlike (for
instance) SqlConnections which I would generally close/dispose and let
the pool worry about it...

Even if it doesn't pool, is the overhead significant in closing each
time versus re-using?

Cheers,

Marc

additional; relating in particular to IIS-hosted "svc" style services,
using transport encryption and without any security negotiations [for
compatibility with existing systems, security handled via bespoke
extensions / headers]

Marc

Thus wrote Marc,

> General question; WCF clients - do these (broadly) pool? My assumption
> is "no".

That's right. Closing the client prematurely can also terminate a session
or a secure conversation, which is quite expensive to establish.

> Specifically, if I am expecting to perform additional requests
> shortly, should I close the client and re-obtain when needed, or leave
> it open and re-use it? I would lean towards the latter, unlike (for
> instance) SqlConnections which I would generally close/dispose and let
> the pool worry about it...

In this scenario (and especially when using more expensive binding features)
you should reuse your clients, but also monitor their states closely using
the lifecycle events of ClientBase<T>. Once a client has faulted, call Abort()
on it to avoid leaking resources, and replace it with a fresh instance. See
http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms734653.aspx for further details.

Cheers,
--
Joerg Jooss
news-reply@joergjooss.de

Thankyou - I think that confirms my thoughts... unfortunately the
"always close" warning on generated classes doesn't make this very
clear ;-p

Cheers,

Marc