Microsoft has published a paper that compares WCF to other communication stacks (WSE, ASMX, ES…). Of course WCF is the fastest of them all (in most situations). It would have been nice to give us the test code to verify this against our own networks…

The following section made me wonder (quoting):

“3.3.2 Self-Hosted Secure Request/Reply TCP Application

In this section, the performance of WCF and ES are compared for the same message loads as the previous section (Section 3.3.1) with security enabled. Specifically, transport-level SSL security is employed and ASP.NET Role principle is used for the authorization. Figure 9 shows that the performance of ES on a uni processor is faster than WCF by 24% for the primitive message type while for the order message type, WCF is faster than ES by 69%.”

Anyone ever seen Enterprise Services running over SSL (and what does ASP.NET has to do with this)?

Check it out yourself:
http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb310550.aspx