Question

I googled forever, and I couldn’t find an answer to this; the answer is either obvious (and I need more training) or it’s buried deep in documentation (or not documented). Somebody must know this.

I’ve been arguing with somebody who insisted on caching some static files on an ASP.NET site, where I thought it’s not necessary for a simple fact that all other files that produce dynamic HTML are not cached (by default; let’s ignore output caching for now; let’s also ignore the caching mechanism that person had in mind [in-memory or out on network]). In other words, why cache some xml file (regardless on how frequently it’s accessed) when all aspx files are read from disk on every request that map to them? If I’m right, by caching such static files very little would be gained (less disk-read operations), but more memory would be spent (if cached in memory) or more network operations would be caused (if cached on external machine). Does somebody know what in fact happens when an aspx file is [normally] requested? Thank you.

Answer 1

If I’m not mistaken ASPX files are compiled at run-time, on first access. After the page is compiled into an in-memory instance of a Page class, requests to the same resource (ASPX page) are serviced against the object in memory. So in essence, they are cached with respect to disk-access.

Obviously the dynamic content is generated for every request, unless otherwise cached using output caching mechanisms.

Regarding memory consumption vs disk access time, I have to say that from the performance stand point it makes sense to store objects in memory rather than reading them from disk every time if they are used often. Disk access is 2 orders of magnitude slower than access in RAM. Although inappropriate caching strategies could push frequently used objects out of memory to make room for seldom used objects which could hurt performance for obvious reasons. That being said, caching is really important for a high-performance website or web application.

As an update, consider this:

• Typical DRAM access times are between 50 – 200 nano-seconds
• Average disk-access times are in the range of 10 – 20 milliseconds

That means that without caching a hit against disk will be ~200 times slower than accessing RAM. Of course, the operating system, the hard-drive and possible other components in between may do some caching of their own so the slow-down may only occur on first hit if you only have a couple such files you’re reading from.

Finally, the only way to be certain is to do some benchmarking. Stress-test both implementations and choose the version that works best in your case!