Vista - ViewState vs. Database

Thanks for your followup.

I'm glad that you've made the decision. If there is anything else we can
help in the future, welcome to post here.

Sincerely,

Steven Cheng

Microsoft MSDN Online Support Lead


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Hi,

From your description, you're wondering tradeoff between storeing database
records in ASP.NET page's viewstate and query them in every request,
correct?

Based on my understanding, if you're using Databound control(such as
Gridview, DataGrid) to display data queried from database, after you
perform databinding, the viewstate will automatically store those necessary
info for the Gridview/DataGrid to display each rows in sequential requests.
However, the database table based structure is not persisted
automatically. Therefore , I'm wondering what you want to do or what's the
reason that you may need to cache/store the entire database table (e.g.
datatable/dataset) into Viewstate?

For general consideration, I think you can consider the following factors:

1. ViewState is only used for store data which need to reuse between the
same page's multiple post. If you request the page(via HTTP GET) again, the
viewstate(stored in previous request) is no longer available. For data
that need to be persisted between multiple page or requests(not only
postback), I think Session State and Application Cache is better.

2. For impaction, since viewstate is persisted as an html hidden field in
page's html source, if the data you want to store is very large, it will
surely increase your page's response content size and that'll make the page
display or postback slowly for low bandwidth clients(for internet
scenaros). And if you cache large data in SessionState or Application
Cache, that will not impact response stream size, but if that is used
frequently, the server-side memory will have some pressure.

3. If the bottleneck is not at the web application and backend database
server(performing data accessing operations such as query data), I
recommend you query the data from database in every request where you need
to display the data. But if the data is large and really static or
unchangable, you can consider using Application Cache to cache them.

#Using the ASP.NET Application Cache to Make Your Applications Scream
http://www.developer.com/net/net/article.php/1477771

#ASP.NET Caching Overview
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms178597.aspx

Sincerely,

Steven Cheng

Microsoft MSDN Online Support Lead


Delighting our customers is our #1 priority. We welcome your comments and
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--------------------I

> From your description, you're wondering tradeoff between storeing databaseYes.
Not using datagrid. Using custom display controls. I can choose to
enable/disable viewstate.
That is my point. I don't know where my bottleneck is yet. I'm looking for a
"best practice". Something that works in most scenarios. I can choose to
enable view state and only hit the database once - then reuse the data for
multiple postbacks - this will obviously create a larger html response to the
client. Or I can choose to keep the page size smaller, but hit my database on
each postback - this will be more taxing on the server of course. As a
general rule - which is better? And why?

-------------------

Hi MMC,

Thanks for your quick response.

For the bottleneck issue, I suggest you try the following things:

1. ASP.NET's output trace can print out the time each event finished or any
output statement's time, and you can write out some custom statement in
each event and lookup the time slot in the trace.

2. Visual studio 2005/2008 provide performance profiling tools that can
help us profile application(include desktop and web apps)'s performance.
such as which part takes most time or which part is called most frequently:

#Analyzing Application Performance
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/libr...29(VS.80).aspx

#Visual Studio Profiler Team Blog
http://blogs.msdn.com/profiler/

this is helpful to detect potential bottlenecks in many cases.

For your further question "As a general rule - which is better? And why?",
here is my opinion for your reference:

1. If database server is powerful enough to support frequent query/update
processing or such operations are not quite frequent, I'll always do the
query instead of caching the data. Since that can save webserver memory.

2. If data is quite large and operations are so frequent that may impact
database server, I'll first consider caching data at server-side (such as
in memory cache) rather than use page's viewstate. The reason is as below:

** given anytime, for an application, user experience is the most
important, large page size is certainly big problem for client user
experience.

** also, large page content also impact server memory since such large
data(in form field) is post back to server and write down to client in
every request, so means ASP.NET runtime need to load it into memory
everytime processing page request.

How do you think?

Sincerely,

Steven Cheng

Microsoft MSDN Online Support Lead


Delighting our customers is our #1 priority. We welcome your comments and
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--------------------<lzALYqj4IHA.4056@xxxxxx>40.244.149databaseneedatheonandPleasehttp://msdn.microsoft.com/subscripti...ult.aspx#notifissuesfollowthesituationsbestcontactingrights.butdatabase,theperformance, I

> 1. If database server is powerful enough to support frequent query/updateSo from a performance perspective, saving webserver memory is more important
that reducing the load on the db server?
This is an interesting idea. But this seems to contradict #1. So the
question is still where to I want to place the heaviest load - web or db
server?

--------------------------

Thanks for your reply MCM,

Not absolute. At least I would prefer that. However, for a specific
application, it much depends on the actual cost of each stage( web client
to server, webserver, server to database server..). And the best way is to
do some profiling and get some idea of the actual cost or bottleneck and do
optimize against the critical point.

Sincerely,

Steven Cheng

Microsoft MSDN Online Support Lead


Delighting our customers is our #1 priority. We welcome your comments and
suggestions about how we can improve the support we provide to you. Please
feel free to let my manager know what you think of the level of service
provided. You can send feedback directly to my manager at:
msdnmg@xxxxxx.

--------------------
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<uEmi0kn4IHA.1340@xxxxxx>query/updateimportantasandPleasehttp://msdn.microsoft.com/subscripti...ult.aspx#notifrights.

Hi MCM,

How are you doing?

Have you got any further ideas on this or have you determined which
approach to use? If there is anything else need help, please feel free to
post here.

Sincerely,

Steven Cheng
Microsoft MSDN Online Support Lead


Delighting our customers is our #1 priority. We welcome your comments and
suggestions about how we can improve the support we provide to you. Please
feel free to let my manager know what you think of the level of service
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--------------------
todotheimpact

Well, I decided for the best possible user performance, I need to disable
ViewState as much as possible to keep the html smaller. The slowest part of
the network is the outbound data transfer to the client - much slower that
the gig traffic on the internal network. However, from a cost perspective,
building out a SQL cluster is more expensive than adding load balanced web
servers. So rather than making extra db calls, I'm going to try and cache
data on the webserver. This will of course mean a strain on RAM for the
webserver, but that seems like the best performance to cost ratio I can come
up with.

"Steven Cheng [MSFT]" wrote:

Thanks for your followup.

I'm glad that you've made the decision. If there is anything else we can
help in the future, welcome to post here.

Sincerely,

Steven Cheng

Microsoft MSDN Online Support Lead


Delighting our customers is our #1 priority. We welcome your comments and
suggestions about how we can improve the support we provide to you. Please
feel free to let my manager know what you think of the level of service
provided. You can send feedback directly to my manager at:
msdnmg@xxxxxx.

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