Hi,

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I see the log, and see the time changes. But what do you do to create the slow response? There has to be some rhythm or reason to it. I would think, that somewhere in the WebService and exception is being thrown and causing that lag. It must not be being thrown everytime, but it probably is being thrown once in a while. Have you tried catching call exceptions in that webservice or tracing the SQL traffic ?
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No sign of any exception - and the web service always returns the correct result (eventually). I also took all SQL out of the equation - the web method being tested is just returning the DateTime.

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Have you been able to narrow it down at all? I think if you could figure how a set of steps to ALWAYS make it have the slow response, that could be the 1st clue to narrowing it down as to WHY it having the slow response.
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Haven't found a way to have it ALWAYS happen - but, so far, it has NEVER happened when the webmethod is called from the local LAN. The steps are always the same - create a Soap client, initialise it, call a method (same method everytime), release it. Closest thing to a pattern is that it might run 8-10 times quickly, once or twice slowly, 8-10 times fast again. This pattrern might repeat a few times then calls will become consistently slow for some time. There's no sign of stress of lack of resources on the web server; and no other web traffic whilst this is going on.

I'm wondering whether this is a name resolution problem - maybe somehing like this could happen if there was a DNS out there with the wrong mapping?
Or something wrong with the router/firewall configuration at the site?

I don't think its related to the problem but I'm also curious to know why a single call to the webmethod always produced two hits on the server - one without the authentication information and one with?

Regards,
Viv