Question

I have started to work on this .NET web application where it has an IOC container (Windsor) to create business managers, and to keep them in the memory until the IIS recycles them. Basically these business managers are having their own states, and data of which the content is modified from background threads that are fired at the Application_Start . This is not the way I was expecting an web application to work ( which are supposed to be stateless and per thread for per request) and I’m not quite sure if this implementation is sustainable/scalable. Has anybody tried the things in this manner if so what are the consequences/pros that you see in this?

Answer 1

We use statics in the application, only for the core features. Static classes are shared across all the requests, so usability should be somewhat low. In the development world, we’re seeing statics pop up more and more: ASP.NET MVC 3 utilizes them for various areas of the application, as well as other popular OS source libraries.

As long as there aren’t a lot of them, you should be OK… but you can always verify with a memory profiler too see how big they are getting, and whether they are sucking up too much memory.

The other alternative could be to place them in cache, or rebuild them and store them in each request. To store them globally in a request, use HttpContext.Current.Items collection.