Question

I have a large txt file thar I want to parse in my web application. Earlier, I had the same application as a kind of desktop application, and I did the parsing one time during the Load, and briong the contents of file into memory.

Here in ASP.NET website, I am not sure if I should be doing this in Page_Load() since parsing a 13Mb text file would make this slow for the user everytime. What should I do to bring this one time into memory and then for all the users, the same in-memory parsed contents can be looked up?

Answer 1

If your file is same for all the users you can put in cache provided by asp.net. If it is specific to user then session could be a place for it but that will acquire a lot of memory and make it almost devastating. This is how you can Cache file in asp.net

string fileContent = Cache["SampleFile"] as string;
if (string.IsNullOrEmpty(fileContent))
{
    using (StreamReader sr = File.OpenText(Server.MapPath("~/SampleFile.txt")))
   {
       fileContent = sr.ReadToEnd();
       Cache.Insert("SampleFile", fileContent, new System.Web.Caching.CacheDependency(Server.MapPath("~/SampleFile.txt")));
   }
}