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Does anyone have experience with using the WCF Performance Counters in a production system and running into any performance issues? I suspect if you are monitoring all Service, Endpoints, and Operations and log all counters to a file, sampling every second, then this is the worst case scenario. From what I gather, the hit comes when you actually sample, not when the counters are turned on. Any real-life experience out there using them in production?

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I can't answer for the WCF ones in detail, but Performance Counters in general work by writing values to some shared memory all the time. So WCF always writes values to a memory mapped file or a shared section in a dll.

When the perfmon application wants to display them, it loads the shared memory and reads from it. That's not a performance hit particularly.

The problem comes when you want to do something with that counter data, like write it to a file or update a graph. That's when the performance starts to be noticeable. This goes double if the reader is running across the network.

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