Performance comparison between 4.0 and 1.0 for Devices

Question

We are currently using Sync Services 1.0 for devices as our framework.  The current sync process is rather slow and we have worked with Microsoft in the past to implement everything we could to gain the best performance from it (Only syncing required tables, etc). 

How is the performance of the Sync Framework 4.0 compared to 1.0?  If we were to sync the same 20 tables under both versions would you see a significant reduction in the amount of time it takes for the sync to complete?  Not asking for actual numbers but just want to get an idea if it will be worth the investment to upgrade to 4.0.  The last thing I would want is to move up to 4.0 and the sync taakes the same amount of time as it did in the past.

This is for a Windows Mobile 6.* device running a SQL Compact 3.5 SP2 database.

 

Thanks,

 

Answer 1

please note that the supposed to be V4 (it has since been postponed and will now be released as sample code instead) is just a layer on top of the v2.1 release. It's supposed to provide support to Silverlight, WP7 and other non-MS platform via a slightly custom OData implementation.

personally, i wouldn't count on a massive performance boost. Having said that, if MS releases the code, you will have much more control over the code to fully optimize it.

Answer 2

We haven't done a performance comparision, but I would guess that for your scenario you will not gain either throughput or memory use. The 4.0 scenario is designed for reach - so that any device with storage can participate in syncing with a service. Therefore it involves more serialization and deserialization of entities into a format that different devices can understand.

 

You could quickly prototype your app on our 4.0 release and get some numbers to figure out if you see any gains? If you do port your app to the 4.0 open-source code release, the benefit will be that you can more quickly add clients that run on Windows Phone 7 or other devices too.