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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-21T20:01:49+00:00

I have a function called on every single page: /// <summary> /// Gets the

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I have a function called on every single page:

/// <summary>
/// Gets the date of the latest blog entry
/// </summary>
public static DateTime GetNewestBlogDate()
{
    DateTime ReturnDate = DateTime.Now.AddDays(30);
    using (var db = new DataClassesDataContext())
    {
        var q = (from d in db.tblBlogEntries orderby d.date descending select new {d.date}).FirstOrDefault();
        if (q != null)
            ReturnDate = q.date;
    }
    return ReturnDate;
}

It works like this website, it gets the latest blog entry date and if it’s greater than the users cookie value it displays a new icon next to the blog link.

It seems rather wasteful to keep calling this function per page request, called 1:1 on the number of page requests you have. Say you have 30,000 page views per day, that’s 1,250 database queries per hour.

Is there any way I can cache this results, and have it expire say every hour?

I’m aware it’s a bit of a micro optimisation, but given 10 or so similar functions per page it might add up to something worthwhile. You could denormalise it into a single table and return them all in one go, but I’d rather cache if possible as it’s easier to manage.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Since it’s not based on the user (the cookie is, but the query doesn’t seem to be) – you can just use the standard ASP.NET Cache.

    Just insert the result with an expiration of 1 hour. If you like, you can even use the callback to automatically refresh the cache.

    Assuming you’ve stored it into MS-SQL, you could even use a SqlCacheDependency to invalidate when new data is inserted. Or, if your inserting code is well-factored, you could manually invalidate the cache then.

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