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I have a project and it needs to access a large amount of proprietary data in ASP.NET. This was done on the Linux/PHP by loading the data in shared memory. I was wondering if trying to use Memory Mapped Files would be the way to go, or if there is a better way with better .NET support. I was thinking of using the Data Cache but not sure of all the pitfalls of size of data being saved in the Cache.
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The principal benefits of memory-mapping are efficiency, faster file access, the ability to share memory between applications, and more efficient coding.
Accessing memory mapped files is faster than using direct read and write operations for two reasons. Firstly, a system call is orders of magnitude slower than a simple change to a program's local memory.
Memory-mapped files cannot be larger than 2GB on 32-bit systems. When a memmap causes a file to be created or extended beyond its current size in the filesystem, the contents of the new part are unspecified.
File mapping is the process of mapping the disk sectors of a file into the virtual memory space of a process. Once mapped, your app accesses the file as if it were entirely resident in memory.
I know this is a bit late, but the .NET 4.0 framework now supports memory-mapped files out of the box:
http://blogs.msdn.com/salvapatuel/archive/2009/06/08/working-with-memory-mapped-files-in-net-4.aspx
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If you are looking for a Memory Mapped library for C#, take a peek at Tomas Restrepo's filemap wrapper. It's licensed under the LGPL.
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