WCF disabling UseNagleAlgorithm while connecting t

Question

Have a bunch of WCF REST services hosted on Azure that access a SQL Azure database. I see that ServicePointManager.UseNagleAlgorithm is set to true. I understand that setting this to false would speed up calls (inserts of records < 1460 bytes) to table storage - the following link talks about it.

My Question - Would disabling the Nagle Algorithm also speed up my calls to SQL Azure?

Answer 1

Nagle's algorithm is all about buffering tcp-level data into a smaller # of packets, and is not tied to record size. You could be writing rows to Table Storage of, say, 1300 bytes of data, but once you include tcp header info, content serialization, etc., the data transmitted could be larger than the threshold of 1460 bytes.

In any case: the net result is that you could be seeing write delays up to 500ms when the algorithm is enabled, as data is buffered, resulting in less tcp packets over the wire.

It's possible that disabling Nagle's algorithm would help with your access to SQL Azure, but you'd probably need to do some benchmarking to see if your throughput is being affected based on the type of reads/writes you're doing. It's possible that the calls to SQL Azure, with the requisite SQL command text, result in large-enough packets that disabling nagle wouldn't make a difference.