Question

I have several web services that logged-in user interact with. Currently they’re running on ASMX but pending an upgrade to WCF. I’m going to write a logger that tracks the name of the request, the user ID, the parameters, the time processing time, if there was an error and a few other things. I’m thinking of something like this:

public class MyWebService : System.Web.Services.Webservice
{
    MyAppLogger TheAppLogger = new MyAppLogger();

    [WebMethod(EnableSession = true)]
    public string SomeWebService(string SomeParameters)
    {
         TheAppLogger.StartLogging();
         TheJsonStringToReturn = "";

         try
         {
            //do something that populates TheJsonStringToReturn
         }
         catch
         {
             TheAppLogger.LogException();
         }

         TheAppLogger.LogRequest();

         return TheJsonStringToReturn;
    }
}

My question is this: if I go with what I just described, the LogRequest() method would store the request in the DB before the request is complete. Is that going to be performance problem? How would I change this code so that the database write would happen AFTER the request is responded to?

Thanks for your suggestions.

Answer 1

You have a few options – queuing, asynchronous processing, spawning a worker thread, etc. See this post for a few good answers:

doing database write after the response