Ajax posting a complex and large object to Web API controller is very slow

Question

I am post a large object with slightly complex structure via jQuery ajax to a Web API controller method but, it is very slow and it takes more than an hour for the request to reach the Web API controller method.

The content length is captured in the Application_BeginRequest method and it is 27505212.

The ajax post is as shown below,

public static Send(request: RequestWrapper) {
    return $.ajax({
        url: 'api/MyController/methodname',
        type: 'POST',
        dataType: 'json',
        data: request
    });
}

And the controller method is as shown below,

    [HttpPost]
    public HttpResponseMessage Send(RequestWrapper request)
    {
    }

Is there a better / simple way to do this? Any suggestion is greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

27 megabytes is a really big POST payload. You've discovered how it's possible for a payload to be too big!

You should break it up into much smaller chunks, maybe of no longer than 10-50k. Then your server can reassemble the large object from the chunks. If you're on load-balanced infrastructure that reassembly operation will make your shared session manager work really hard.

Your best long term solution to this is to refactor your large object so it's several hundred smaller objects. You didn't tell us anything about the structure of your data, so it's impossible to offer suggestions on how to do that.