Increase Outgoing Connections

Question

We have a cluster of window services that acts as a hub. These services will consume several third-party web services. We currently have maxConnection set to 20. However, there are times when services process more than 20 concurrent requests each, and any calls to external web services will be deleted.

Is there anything we need if we increase this number? What will be the maximum number we can set safely?

 <system.net> <connectionManagement> <add address="*" maxconnection="20" /> </connectionManagement> </system.net> 

Edit: due to the nature of the system, we cannot use queues to manage requests.

Answer 1

Microsoft recommends 12 * n, where n is the number of processors, but you should consider setting more options. This KB article is a good starting point:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/821268