TCPClient in asp.net mvc application - asp.net-mvc

Question

I have asp.net mvc app that shows varios events. All events stored in a database. But now, I have to load data from the database and remote program. This program have external service (this is simple program that listening specific TCP port and recieve a query and send xml back).
And, I wrote simple page for test that connects to external program. The code got from MSDN:
static string Connect(String server, String message)
{
try
{
// Create a TcpClient.
Int32 port = 9197;
TcpClient client = new TcpClient(server, port);
// Translate the passed message into ASCII and store it as a Byte array.
Byte[] data = System.Text.Encoding.ASCII.GetBytes(message);
// Get a client stream for reading and writing.
// Stream stream = client.GetStream();
NetworkStream stream = client.GetStream();
// Send the message to the connected TcpServer.
stream.Write(data, 0, data.Length);
// Receive the TcpServer.response.
// Buffer to store the response bytes.
data = new Byte[256];
// String to store the response ASCII representation.
String responseData = String.Empty;
// Read the first batch of the TcpServer response bytes.
Int32 bytes = stream.Read(data, 0, data.Length);
responseData = System.Text.Encoding.ASCII.GetString(data, 0, bytes);
stream.Close();
client.Close();
return responseData;
}
catch (ArgumentNullException e)
{
//
}
catch (SocketException e)
{
//
}
}
This is my action:
public ActionResult GetData()
{
string query = "some query";
var response = Connect("192.168.0.1", query);
var model = ParseResponse(response);
return View(model);
}
I think this solution will reduce the perfomance.
What is best practicies to use TCPClient in ASP.NET MVC 3 app?
What you think about my code?
Any suggestions are welcome.

Answer 1

I think this solution will reduce the perfomance.
Well. All/most database operations are done over sockets. And you do not notice that, do you?
The most likely performance issues are:
Your server
Server location
Connection setup
The only thing I would do now is to build in checks in the client to monitor the response time and write to a log (or send an email) when the response times are too high.
Don't try to optimize performance until that happen.
Solutions for the above mentioned issues:
Refactor and optimize
Either put the server on the same lan or create a cache proxy server.
Use connection pooling instead of disconnecting the connections every time.

Answer 2

I think this solution will reduce the perfomance.
It's as any other remote request that your server does - an I/O intensive operation. So you could use an asynchronous controller and the asynchronous versions of the TcpClient methods. This way you won't be jeopardizing any worker threads on your server during the execution of the remote request.