NHibernate Many-To-Many Performance Issue - performance

Question

My application has the following entities (with a many-to-many relationship between Product and Model):
public class TopProduct {
public virtual int Id { get; set; }
public virtual Product Product { get; set; }
public virtual int Order { get; set; }
}
public class Product {
public virtual int Id { get; set; }
public virtual string Name { get; set; }
public virtual IList<Model> Models { get; set; }
}
public class Model {
public virtual string ModelNumber { get; set; }
public virtual IList<Product> Products { get; set; }
}
Note: A product could have 1000s of models.
I need to display a list of TopProducts and the first 5 models (ordered alphabetically) against each one.
For example say I have the following query:
var topProducts = session.Query<TopProduct>()
.Cacheable()
.Fetch(tp => tp.Product).ThenFetchMany(p => p.Models)
.OrderBy(tp => tp.Order)
.ToList();
If I now say:
foreach (var topProduct in topProducts) {
var models = topProduct.Product.Models.Take(5).ToList();
...
}
This executes extremely slowly as it retrieves an item from the second level cache for each model. Since there could be 1000s of models against a product, it would need to retrieve 1000s of items from the cache the second time it is executed.
I have been racking my brain trying to think of a better way of doing this but so far I am out of ideas. Unfortunately my model and database cannot be modified at this stage.
I'd appreciate the help. Thanks

Answer 1

The key to your problem is understanding how entity and query caching work.
Entity caching stores, essentially, the POID of an entity and its property values.
When you want to get/initialize an instance, NH will first check the cache to see if the values are there, in order to avoid a db query.
Query caching, on the other hand, stores a query as the key (to simplify, let's say it's the command text and the parameter values), and a list of entity ids as the value (this is assuming your result is a list of entities, and not a projection)
When NH executes a cacheable query, it will see if the results are cached. If they are, it will load the proxies from those ids. Then, as you use them, it will initialize them one by one, either from the entity cache or from the db.
Collection cache is similar.
Usually, getting many second-level cache hits for those entity loads is a good thing. Unless, of course, you are using a distributed cache located in a separate machine, in which case this is almost as bad as getting them from the db.
If that is the case, I suggest you skip caching the query.