Why Azure Worker Role was taking time to process request
This had been a mystery for a month. I used wireshark to trace that the request was reaching azure, but azure was responding only after 2 minutes. I used wireshark filters like the below: tcp.port = XXX Also: (ip.src==X or ip.src == Y) and (ip.dst == X or ip.dst == Y) All that turned out is that the service was receiving the method call 2 minutes after the server got the request from the client. Turned out that the WCF service constructor was doing a 2 minute long activity each time. I just prevented it from doing it everytime, and ensured it is done once when the service starts up, rather than on the constructor of the WCF service. Sometimes the problems are with old legacy code which does bad stuff. Nothing wrong with WCF!