Ran into a performance issue in a .Net remoting situation. A Winforms app is calling an application server asking for data. A relatively large DataSet (>10,000 rows, <6 columns) being passed over the wire was causing a performance problem. The database and application servers processed it quickly. Examining the transfer with WireShark showed that the transfer wasn’t so bad either. There was a flurry of data passed, and then a bunch of waiting on the client-side, with the client CPU usage around 50% the entire duration of the wait. Turns out there is a calculated column in one of the data tables. The column is not calculated on the application server-side, so as not to pass a bunch of data across the wire that would be unnecessary. The calc happens on the client. That was the source of the slowdown and CPU usage. In the end the solution to the problem was not using the calculated column, we found a different solution to fix the business problem. I suppose you could perform the calculation in the SQL statement that was ultimately filling the DataSet. That might take longer to transfer, but won’t slow down the client app.
