Question

I am developing a website for a client (ASP.NET, T-SQL). It is a data-entry website allowing many of their users to login and manipulate records in the same database.

There are instructions (basically a list of string) throughout the form, telling the users what to do for each section; these instructions are themselves present in the database.

On each login, I store these instructions in the Session[] object per authenticated user. The instructions are identical for everyone.

I’ve looked at a solution which suggested storing a common session identifier in the database and then querying it to re-use that particular session but this seems very hacky. What is a best-practices solution to accomplish this? Is there a ‘common’ object available to all users?

Answer 1

Firstly, does it matter at this point? Yes, it’s bad practice and inefficent, but if you’re storing 20Kb of strings in memory and have a maximum of 100 users, that’s 2,000Kb of data. Hardly a lot of memory “wasted”. Even at 200Kb of strings, that’s 20,000Kb of data. Again, not a lot. Is it worth your time, and the client waiting for you to solve it, right now?

If you decide it is then you could:

1. Store the strings in the Application object or a static class so that they’re retrieved once and used many times.
2. Retrieve the strings on every page view. This may not be as performance damaging as it seems.
3. Use something like the Cache class in System.Web.Caching.
4. Make use of Output Caching.
5. Make use of Windows Server AppFabric “Velocity” memory cache.