>>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?
>
>I might be wrong on this but AFAICS a ping will only tell you that the IP address is accessible - no guarantee that IIS is warmed up and running so I can't really see the ping performing a useful function for the time it takes ?

Hi Viv,

Yes, Paul is correct in this case the ping is just a method name as a call to the web service. The Issue as I see it, they don't actually do anything with it and the intended web service call is made regardless. It doesn't consume lots of bandwidth as the parameters are really none, but on any given day right now there are 100 instances of the applcation running. By next year that number will be 3 or 400 all doing a ping method call every 10 seconds. My guess at this point if I can't find another valid reason for this, I will not continue that.
Thanks