I’m looking to make use of some basic xml files, most no more than 100kb and serialize/deserialize them into objects. This would be done using the .NET frameworks built in serialize attributes/classes, in lieu of holding them in a database.
My concern if the site is being hit (on a well balanced web farm) multiple times, could there be possible performance issues? The amount of data and number of objects/fields coming back isn’t very large, maybe 10 objects – and they would be on powerful virtual servers.
The performance of your applications will always be a matter of balance between your code and your hardware. Because you are building a web application, it is inherently necessary that big workloads are handled with multi-threading, so you can have multiple background threads performing time-expensive jobs, avoiding slow performance on the threads that handle your web requests. However your escenario doesn’t look so much of a problem, not even to a tipical laptop nowadays, be sure that you don’t overengineer your applications when simple task can be well-handled by your current servers.