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At the moment I am working on a project admin application in C# 3.5 on ASP.net. In order to reduce hits to the database, I'm caching a lot of information using static variables. For example, a list of users is kept in memory in a static class. The class reads in all the information from the database on startup, and will update the database whenever changes are made, but it never needs to read from the datebase.
The class pings other webservers (if they exist) with updated information at the same time as a write to the database. The pinging mechanism is a Windows service to which the cache object registers using a random available port. It is used for other things as well.
The amount of data isn't all that great. At the moment I'm using it just to cache the users (password hashes, permissions, name, email etc.) It just saves a pile of calls being made to the database.
I was wondering if there are any pitfalls to this method and/or if there are better ways to cache the data?
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Static data will cache exactly the same as any other data.
Static variables are used for defining constants because their values can be retrieved by invoking the class without creating an instance of it. Static variables can be initialized outside the member function or class definition. You can also initialize static variables inside the class definition.
Static variables are generally considered bad because they represent global state and are therefore much more difficult to reason about. In particular, they break the assumptions of object-oriented programming.
To manually cache application data, you can use the MemoryCache class in ASP.NET. ASP.NET also supports output caching, which stores the generated output of pages, controls, and HTTP responses in memory. You can configure output caching declaratively in an ASP.NET Web page or by using settings in the Web. config file.
A pitfall: A static field is scoped per app domain, and increased load will make the server generate more app domains in the pool. This is not necessarily a problem if you only read from the statics, but you will get duplicate data in memory, and you will get a hit every time an app domain is created or recycled.
Better to use the Cache object - it's intended for things like this.
Edit: Turns out I was wrong about AppDomains (as pointed out in comments) - more instances of the Application will be generated under load, but they will all run in the same AppDomain. (But you should still use the Cache object!)
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