Best Solution for Busy WCF Service to Database

Question

I have a WCF service that writes log records to a database for several applications. It logs sometimes 200K+ an hour. I am using entity framework currently to create the records and each is created independently (per call). That means a connection
is getting created for each one. I've found that because of the heavy amount of connections (this database is shared with another application), that I'm having max connection issues. Since this application is consistently writing to the database, I didn't
know if there was a better way of limiting its connections (maybe sharing them) as the inserts are done asynchronously so the requestor is not held up, and they don't have to be immediately inserted. Since immediately having them isn't a must have, I've also
considered writing the logs to a file then building a batch insert to occur every so often so that only one connection is open when that occurs. Just wondering what may be some suggestions on the best way to go about the creation and handling of the database
connections for a system like this? Thanks.

Answer 1

Hello acfalcon2001,
From my experience, in your case, it is not recommended to call SaveChange() for every record because as you also mentions, it would cause a the heavy amount of connections.
>>I've also considered writing the logs to a file then building a batch insert to occur every so often so that only one connection is open when that occurs
This is the way I would suggest you could do for your case, for using the batch insert in Entity Framework, you could set a static variable to count added the number of entities, if it reaches a limit number(you could set it to 100 or 1000 or others) and
then call the SaveChange() method(this method actually perform a batch insert operation even for one record). For this way, you could refer to the link below to check a detail usage and there is 
detail test information:
http://stackoverflow.com/a/5942176
Or you could use another method:EntityFramework.BulkInsert
https://efbulkinsert.codeplex.com/
And from your description, it seems that your service would only perform an insert operation, if so, you could set:
yourContext.Configuration.AutoDetectChangesEnabled = false;
yourContext.Configuration.ValidateOnSaveEnabled = false;
This coudl improve performance of insertion.
Regards.
We are trying to better understand customer views on social support experience, so your participation in this interview project would be greatly appreciated if you have time. Thanks for helping make community forums a great place.
Click
HERE to participate the survey.