Question

I have a legacy website that needs a little optimization because of poor performance. It is an asp.net shopping website with linq to sql as data layer and MVP pattern as UI pattern.

The most costly entities in the db are product and category tables that have a one to many relationship. These two entities might not change regularly unless a user of admin group decides to add a product or category… etc. i was wondering how resource costly would it be to create and fetch everything from these two entities for each request! so if i could have had a way to keep my data alive…

first I thought well let’s use AJAX for data retrievals so I will create only those entities that I need to query or bind to, but wait, how can I do that without creating a new DataContext instance?!!
At the other side, using cache for whole DataContext is considered a bad decision because of memory cost. So what would be the best option here? How can I improve things?

UPDATE

1) doing what @HatSoft suggested.

Cons: those approaches will not help your code, only the database. beside this, there might be memory issues since we’re putting data in memory instead of rendered html, however this might be the best option regarding de-coupling.

2) using output caching we have this code in an http handler with *.aspx wildcard:

string pagePath = Context.Request.Url.AbsolutePath;
object cacheKey = application[pagePath];
if(cacheKey == null)
  return; //application restarted/first run so cache the stuff
else
  Context.Response.RemoveOutputCacheItem(pagePath);

Cons: now we should link the pagePath to each database entity that the page uses, but if i do so then i’m coupling things instead of de-coupling them. this approach also will run into a little hard coding.

3) another solution would be output caching in post-cache mode instead of control cache mode. using Subsituation element and setting the OutPutCache Duration to 86400 so the page will be re-created every 24 hours.

Cons: hard coding user controls to produce the html output for Subsituation element dynamically.

so what do you suggest?

Answer 1

I would suggest you look in to SqlDependency class please read this article http://www.asp.net/web-forms/tutorials/data-access/caching-data/using-sql-cache-dependencies-cs

Also I would suggest you look in to loading data in the cache at application startup if it suits your application. Please see a good example here http://www.asp.net/web-forms/tutorials/data-access/caching-data/caching-data-at-application-startup-cs