We just published a great whitepaper written by our WCF/WF Performance PM Saurabh Gupta on the relative performance of WCF compared to ASMX, WSE, Enterprise Services, and Remoting. This is material for your favorites folder. The summary says: To summarize the results, WCF is 25%—50% faster than ASP.NET Web Services, and approximately 25% faster than .NET Remoting. Comparison with .NET Enterprise Service is load dependant, as in one case WCF is nearly 100% faster but in another scenario it is nearly 25% slower. For WSE 2.0/3.0 implementations, migrating them to WCF will obviously provide the most significant performance gains of almost 4x . The one scenario where WCF is slower are some comparison scenarios with ES. I'd say that even getting within strinking distance of ES/COM+/DCOM/RPC performance for a V1 release that's based on Web services technology is quite an astonishing accomplishment. The ES/COM+/DCOM/RPC stack underneath had almost 15 years to get to where it's at. And the 4x should give you a really convincing reason to make the move from WSE to WCF. Read More...