i am checking a setting (from the settings.settings) in the master page to see whether or not to add a stats tracking code to the page or not. In test environment, this is false, production this is true.
I was wondering if this reads the web.config file every time, or if asp.net will “cache” this setting on application startup or something so it is more readily available.
No. It’s cached and actually comparible to a static property.