http - Why does WCF limit concurrent connections to 5?

Question

I have a WCF service (basicHttpBinding) hosted in II7 on Vista that I expect to handle many requests concurrently. I'm attempting to load test the service by spawing 200 threads in a test app and calling the WCF service. I've run this test app on the same machine as the server as well as multiple other computers and I always get the same result - no more than 5 workers are used. Is this a WCF, HTTP or IIS bottleneck?

Answer 1

This is a feature to prevent denial of service attack. Out of the box, WCF is designed to be secure. Check the service behavior, look in msdn for maxConcurrentCalls and maxConcurrentSessions configuration. I think the limit is 10, but I could be wrong.