Question

Greetings,

Windows Azure only supports SQL Azure Session State for multiple instances.

I’m thinking what whether storing the objects in session will boost any performance for given scenario below:

Scenario:
I’ve got MVC Application where it’s header and footer are populated from DB. I’ve created ApplicationController which inherits from controller. This applicationcontroller in turn will be inherited by actual controllers such as Home/Account etc.

I’m thinking of loading all these footer/header value in to session and use the session object for any subsequent requests.

Does anyone know whether this will boost any performance? Only reason I’m asking is that SQL Azure Session would do the same thing i.e. query SQL Azure Session storage for each request?

Thanks.

Answer 1

I would say that right now the amount of performance improvement you get from one option over the other is pretty negligible. The only way to know for sure would be to create some test scenarios.

Having said that, App Fabric Caching is coming out of CTP in less than a month and includes a session provider. If you were willing to use it you’d have two options:

1. Use the App Fabric Caching session provider and the session technique you’ve described above and it should be faster than either of the SQL options
2. Use the cache directly to provide the header and footer information (you’ll still need to keep the data in SQL, but you can populate the cache on demand when headers and footers are requested)