Hi all,

I am working on an application that uses Web Services for all data access. I am noticing the original developer used a timer to issue a call to the web service as sort of a "Ping" every 10 seconds to keep track if the service is alive. Interestingly they don't really do anything with that when it fails or succeeds. If a required call the web service is made, another Ping call is made to verify the service is available first but again, nothing is done except to throw a handled exception and then retry.

The performance of this application is poor and I have through using DotTrace narrowed most of it down to the Web Service calls and the slowness has nothing to do with the time it takes for the web service to respond with data.

My question is why might one need to use any kind of "Keep Alive" on a web service?
Thanks
Tim