Question

Is it possible to cache a page render on an iis web server, but still receive and write query string values (that don’t affect output) to the database? So that the page render does not have to wait for the database trip to execute in order to serve the page? If possible, how do I implement?

For example, we track various affiliate and search marketing data via query strings, and in the master page code behind, we write the given query string data to the database. The output of the page doesn’t change at all for the user (however we may set a cookie based off the qs parameter).

My understanding is that the page render has to wait for the database trip to fully execute in order to render the page. Is that even true?

Answer 1

Yes in general though it can depend on how one handles the caching.

First, you should move that tracking stuff to where it belongs — a HttpModule. Page need not concern itself. Second, what you probably want to look into is some sort of fire and forget service call or message queueing. This makes the database write a non-blocking operation rather than a blocking operation.

Some options for making the operation non-blocking:

• if you are actually writing to a web service, there is an underappreciated [OperationContract(IsOneWay = true)] decoration. Tells the generated proxy to fire and forget the call, will not wait for a response.
• Another option would be to use the Asynchronous ADO.NET bits, especially BeginExecuteNonQuery. If you don’t handle the callback this should just execute off your thread.
• You could always just spawn a thread and deal with it in a non-blocking manner yourself. Just be real careful about handling errors on this thread — unhandled exceptions will take out the app domain.