title: Hosting WCF in IIS 7.5 vs Windows Service for Performance Considerations
body: <p>I have a simple and direct question: is there any performance benefits (or any other type of benefit) I am unaware of when comparing hosting of a WCF service in IIS 7.5 vs. a Windows Service?</p>
  
  <p>I am not in the dark on this topic and have actually hosted several WCF services in <em>both</em> hosting environments. However I was about to start a new service that has some heavier use and wanted to 're-visit' the topic. Right now I am leaning twoard a Windows Service.</p>
  
  <p>I have read posts like the following: <a href="https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1560619/iis-wcf-service-hosting-vs-windows-service">IIS WCF service hosting vs Windows Service</a> which gives some good information, but is a bit out of date (yes even only at 1.5 years old; still using codename 'Dublin Technologies').</p>
  
  <p>There is no ding against Windows Services for me because I am quite comfortable with setup, deployment, and configuration (including applying an SSL cert to a port hosting the WCF service), so this is not a big deal to me vs. IIS.</p>
  
  <p>I always thought application recycling in IIS would be a <em>downside</em> to hosting a WCF service, allowing potential for <em>small</em> possible breaks in communication. I know with a .asmx IIS hosted service (converting to WCF) that I have receives random '401 Unauthorized' (I mean really random like every 5-10,000 calls kind of thing) and I marked that up to idiosyncrasies with IIS and its ability to keep communication up 100% of the time without the app pool being recycled (possibly causing issue? -> this issue is <em>not</em> in question here and just for reference). So I wonder about IIS.</p>
  
  <p>So I would like a current day's perspective (a lot of the MSDN comparison charts are out of date too, always comparing to IIS 6) on hosting a WCF service on Windows Server 2008 R2 in a Windows Service vs. IIS 7.5. Thanks!!</p>