Question

Lets say that you are using a shared hosting plan and your application stores lots of objects
in the application state.

If they start taking too much memory does this mean that the server will just remove them?

If not what will happen then? What happens when the server has no memory left? Can you still store objects into the application or session state?

I am asking this because i am planning on developing a big site that will rely on the application state, and it will be crucial that the objects stored there don’t get destroyed.
What i am afraid of is that at a certain point i might have too many objects in the application state and they might get removed to free up memory.

Answer 1

There are three different thresholds:

1. The total size of your app exceeds the maximum process size on your machine (really only applicable with an x86 OS). In that case, you’ll start getting out of memory errors at first, generally followed very quickly by a process crash.

2. Your process, along with everything else running on the machine, no longer fits in physical memory. In that case, the machine will start to page, generally resulting in extremely poor performance.

3. Your process exceeds the memory limit imposed by IIS on itself, via IIS Manager. In that case, the process will be killed and restarted, as with a regular AppPool recycle.

With the Application object, entries are not automatically removed if you approach any of the above thresholds. With the Cache object, they can be removed, depending on the priority you assign.

As others have said, over-using the Application object isn’t generally a good idea, because it’s not scalable. If you were ever to add a second load-balanced server, keeping the info in sync from one server to another becomes very challenging, among other things.