I was running into an issue where one of my webmethods was taking a large amount of time to return a small set (5-10 objects). I was using LINQ to SQL. I noticed that the LINQ to SQL query was returning all of the rows. After looking into the table a bit further, I noticed that the table included some columns with a larger type (old text column, image column, etc). So, I decided to modify my select to contain just the columns I needed. It improved my response time from roughly 8 seconds to 250 milliseconds. Here’s a sample select statement:

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From t In db.News \_
Where t.NewsID = NewsID \_
Select New With {.Title = t.Title, .Abstract = t.Abstract, .DatePublished = t.DatePublished)

Instead of enumerating these items as type NewsPosting, I had to build a list of type Object or create a new custom type. For my purpose, a Generic.List(Of Object) worked just fine.