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For my thesis I need to measure the performance of Binary Binding vs. basicHttp(Soap) Binding in WCF Services and a Silverlight Client for a specific object.

I already found some example performance data for these bindings.

I wonder how to measure them by myself for a specific object.

Are there any tools which make this process easy or how would you do that?

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I did some tests some time ago (see here) but take them with a grain of salt as that was a very "unscientifical" test (and was done with SL3).

You will have to test several different scenarios: for example a simple object with very large value inside their properties will be very different than a huge list of simple objects, or an object with a huge number of variables with very small values.

Creating the testing harness should not be difficult, I suggest you just do an "echo" service that returns the parameter without touching it. On the client you can simply measure the time between call and answer.

Side note: Fiddler2 will be very useful to check what is happening at http-level.

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Do you still have the source code of your tests? You be great to take a look at it. I would really appreciate –  Ben Sep 24 '10 at 11:12
sorry, the code is lost since a long time somewhere in a box... However it was pretty much trivial. You just need to switch the bindings to binary xml/etc. and use a Stopwatch object on the client side. –  Francesco De Vittori Sep 24 '10 at 12:50
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Metrics are only meaningful in context. You first need to define what exactly you want to measure. Basic network sniffer usage should be a good start (bandwidth) but CPU etc is important too. Actually, even "binary" is horribly ambiguous - it has (this afternoon) come to my attention that I might be able to swap the serializer out from SL WCF. From experience protobuf usually does far better than the unbuilt offerings, so if we can silently add that into SL...

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