When migrating distributed applications written with ASP.NET Web Services, WSE, .NET Enterprise Services and .NET Remoting to WCF, the performance is at least comparable to the other existing Microsoft distributed communication technologies. In most cases, the performance is significantly better for WCF over the other existing technologies. Another important characteristic of WCF is that the throughput performance is inherently scalable from a uni processor to quad processor.

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.