I know I can store small values to the Session.
Lately in my Visual Studio ASP.NET application, I've learned I can also store larger values, such as a DataTable.
This leaves me wondering how much storage the Session can store. Does this depend on the browser or the RAM on the PC?
ASP.NET Session is stored on the webserver that is hosting the website. So the limitation would be how much RAM is on your webserver, not the browser or RAM on the client PC. So if you have 4 users on your site, and each has 128MB of session, then your webserver is going to have more than 512MB of RAM dedicated to ASP.NET.
I also would be very careful about storing a lot of things in session. Especially complex types like DataTable. This is because every time you access that object it has to serialized/deserialized, and this can be very taxing on your webserver's CPU.
I would recommend reading up on some best practices for ASP.NET Session.
Related
I am a new developer and am trying to implement Laravel's (5.1) caching facility to improve the speed of my app. I started out caching a large DB table that my app constantly references - but it got too large so I have backed away from that and am now 'forever' caching smaller chunks of data - for example, for each page only the portions of that large DB table that are relevant.
I have watched 'Caching Essentials' on Laracasts, done some Googling and had a search in this forum (and Laracasts') but I still have a couple of questions:
I am not totally clear on how the cache size limits work when you are using Laravel's file-based system - is there an overall in-app size limit for the cache or is one limited size-wise only per key and by your server size?
What are the signs you should switch from file-based caching to something like Memcached or Redis - and what are the benefits of using one of those services? Is it the fact that your caching is handled on a different server (thereby lightening the load on your own)? Do you switch over to one of these services when your local, file-based cache gets too big for your server?
My app utilizes several tables that have 3,000-4,000 rows - the data in these tables is constantly referenced and will remain static unless I decide to add new options. I am basically looking for the best way to speed up queries to the data in these tables.
Thanks!
I don't think Laravel imposes any limitations on its file i/o at all - the limitations will be with how much what PHP can read / write to a file at once, or hold in its memory / process at any one time.
It does serialise the data that you cache, and unserialise it when you reload it, so your PHP environment would have to be able to process the entire cache file (which is equivalent to the top level cache key) at once. So, if you are getting cacheduser.firstname, it would have to load the whole cacheduser key from the file, unserialise it, then get the firstname key from that.
I would take the PHP memory limit (classic, i know!) as a first point to investigate if you want to keep down this road.
Caching services like Redis or memcached are bespoke, optimised caching solutions. They take some of the logic and responsibility out of your PHP environment.
They can, for example, retrieve sub-keys from items without having to process the whole thing, so can retrieve part of some cached data in a memory efficient way. So, when you request cacheduser.firstname from redis, it just returns you the firstname attribute.
They have other advantages regarding tagging / clearing out subsets of caches (see [the cache tags Laravel docs] (https://laravel.com/docs/5.4/cache#cache-tags))
Another thing to think about is scaling. If your site is large enough, and is load-balanced across multiple servers, the filesystem caching may be different across those servers, as each server can only check their local filesystem for the cache files. A caching service can be on a different server (many hosts will have a separate redis / memcached services available), so isn't victim to this issue.
Also - as I understand it (and this might be the most important thing), the file cache driver in Laravel is mainly for local development and testing. Although it can work fine for simple applications with basic caching needs, it's not intended for large scalable production environments.
Personally, I develop locally and test with file caching, as i'm only dealing with small amounts of data then, and use redis to cache on production environments.
It doesn't necessarily need to be on a separate server to get the benefits. If you are never going to scale to multiple application servers, then using a caching service on the same server will already be a large improvement to caching large documents.
We are moving an asp.net site to Azure Web Role and Azure Sql Database. The site is using output cache and normal Cache[xxx] (i.e. HttpRuntime.Cache). These are now stored in the classic way in the web role instance memory.
The low hanging fruit is to first start using a distributed cache for output caching. I can use in-role cache, either as co-located or with a dedicated cache role, or Redis cache. Both have outputcache providers ready made.
Are there any performance differences between the two (thee with co-located/dedicated) cache methods?
One thing to consider is that will getting the page from Redis for every pageload on every server be faster or slower than composing the page from scratch one every server every 120 seconds but inbetween just getting it from local memory?
Which will scale better when we want to start caching our own data (i.e. pocos) in a distributed cache instead of HttpRuntime.Cache?
-Mathias
Answering to your each question individually:
Are there any performance differences between the two (thee with
co-located/dedicated) cache methods?
Definately co-located caching solution is faster than dedicated cache server, as in co-located/inproc solution request will be handled locally within the process where as dedicated cache solution will involve getting data over the network. However since data will be in-memory on cache server, getting will still be faster than getting from DB.
One thing to consider is that will getting the page from Redis for
every pageload on every server be faster or slower than composing the
page from scratch one every server every 120 seconds but inbetween
just getting it from local memory?
It will depend on number of objects on page i.e. time taken to compose the page from scratch. Though getting from cache will involve network trip time but its mostly in fractions of a millisecond.
Which will scale better when we want to start caching our own data
(i.e. pocos) in a distributed cache instead of HttpRuntime.Cache?
Since HttpRuntime.Cache is in-process caching, it is limited to single process's memory therefore it is not scalable. A distributed cache on the other hand is a scalable solution where you can always add more servers to increase cache space and throughput. Also out-proc nature of distributed cache solution makes it possible to access data cached by on application process to be used by any other process.
You can also look into NCache for Azure as a distributed caching solution. NCache is a native .Net distributed caching solution.
Following blog posts by Iqbal Khan will help you better understand the need of distributed cache for ASP.Net applications:
Improve ASP.NET Performance in Microsoft Azure with Output Cache
How to use a Distributed Cache for ASP.NET Output Cache
I hope this helps :-)
-Sameer
We're running our blog from a shared hosting account. Our host limits the allowed inodes/number of files on the hosting account to 150,000. We've implemented our caching mechanism that caches all pages in full as soon as they are accessed so that subsequent seeks are delivered from cache. Unfortunately, the inode limit won't allow us to store more pages very soon.
Fortunately we have sqlite on our server. Though we have mysql too, but our shared hosting account only allows us to have maximum 25 concurrent connections from the apache webserver to the mysql server. That's a major constraint! Its said that sqlite is "serverless", and so I believe sqlite won't have that kind of limitation.
With that, should I and can I use a sqlite table to store full cache pages of all dynamic pages of our blog ? The average cached page size is around 125 kbs and I have around 125,000 cache pages and growing.
Will that have any kind of bottlenecks to slow down the cache page delivery out of the sqlite database file?
Will I be able to write more pages to the cache_table in the sqlite database while simuntaneously deliverying sought pages from the cache_table to the site visitors?
I't not a good idea cause sqlite usage may impact you website performance (at least on response time).
I recommend to use Memcached or NoSQL DB as a last resort (need to test for response time rise).
But if you have not choise, sqlite will be better then MySQL, cause its select operations are faster.
Haven't calculated that because there has never been a need to calculate max page generation time. I manage all pages statically in full, and with that, it has always been a stable process without any trouble.
Our server load varies from 400 to 8000 page requests in an hour.
With squid, we can cache webpages. I am not sure if it provides the same number of caching methods as ASP.NET caching (I primarily use ASP.NET), but it's a tool to cache webpages.
Then we have memcached, which can cache database tables. I believe this is correct, and it is like SqlCacheDependency (correct me if I am wrong).
However, is there any situation in a large web application where one would find room to use memcached, squid, AND ASP.NET (or PHP, JSP - application framework-level) caching.
Thanks!
You may find that caching entire pages is too coarsely-grained, and caching database tables doesn't get you enough of a boost, leaving a big need for caching chunks of stuff.
Say, for example, you had an application that showed the name of the logged-in user on every page. Caching entire pages wouldn't really work, so you need to drop down a level and cache somewhere within the app framework.
Then we have memcached, which can cache database tables. I believe this is correct, and it is like SqlCacheDependency (correct me if I am wrong).
Memcached is a distributed hashtable. The main benefits over the built in .NET caching is that your cache is scalable (you can add as many memcached boxen as you want) and synchronized (all your web servers have access to the same stuff, and invalidating or updating data from one web server is instantly propagated to all of them)
Performance-wise, it is worse than the .NET cache (you are looking up objects across servers, as opposed to an in-memory lookup on one machine)
However, is there any situation in a large web application where one would find room to use memcached, squid, AND ASP.NET (or PHP, JSP - application framework-level) caching.
For the reasons above, I can imagine a 2-level cache, using the .NET cache first, then memcached. (e.g. a Get() looks at memcached, stores the result in the .NET cache set to expire in 10 seconds, then uses the .NET cache for all the get calls with the same cache key during the next 10 seconds, rinse, repeat)
This way, you get the performance of the in-memory cache lookup without the network IO cost of a pure memcached solution, with the synchronization and scalability benefits of memcached.
I'm building an application with multiple server involved. (4 servers where each one has a database and a webserver. 1 master database and 3 slaves + one load balancer)
There is several approach to enable caching. Right now it's fairly simple and not efficient at all.
All the caching is done on an NFS partition share between all servers. NFS is the bottleneck in the architecture.
I have several ideas implement
caching. It can be done on a server
level (local file system) but the
problem is to invalidate a cache
file when the content has been
update on all server : It can be
done by having a small cache
lifetime (not efficient because the
cache will be refresh sooner that it
should be most of the time)
It can also be done by a messaging
sytem (XMPP for example) where each
server communicate with each other.
The server responsible for the
invalidation of the cache send a
request to all the other to let them
know that the cache has been
invalidated. Latency is probably
bigger (take more time for everybody
to know that the cache has been
invalidated) but my application
doesn't require atomic cache
invalidation.
Third approach is to use a cloud
system to store the cache (like
CouchDB) but I have no idea of the
performance for this one. Is it
faster than using a SQL database?
I planned to use Zend Framework but I don't think it's really relevant (except that some package probably exists in other Framework to deal with XMPP, CouchDB)
Requirements: Persistent cache (if a server restart, the cache shouldn't be lost to avoid bringing down the server while re-creating the cache)
http://www.danga.com/memcached/
Memcached covers most of the requirements you lay out - message-based read, commit and invalidation. High availability and high speed, but very little atomic reliability (sacrificed for performance).
(Also, memcached powers things like YouTube, Wikipedia, Facebook, so I think it can be fairly well-established that organizations with the time, money and talent to seriously evaluate many distributed caching options settle with memcached!)
Edit (in response to comment)
The idea of a cache is for it to be relatively transitory compared to your backing store. If you need to persist the cache data long-term, I recommend looking at either (a) denormalizing your data tier to get more performance, or (b) adding a middle-tier database server that stores high-volume data in straight key-value-pair tables, or something closely approximating that.
In defence of memcached as a cache store, if you want high peformance with low impact of a server reboot, why not just have 4 memcached servers? Or 8? Each 'reboot' would have correspondingly less effect on the database server.
I think I found a relatively good solution.
I use Zend_Cache to store locally each cache file.
I've created a small daemon based on nanoserver which manage cache files locally too.
When one server create/modify/delete a cache file locally, it send the same action to all server through the daemon which do the same action.
That mean I have local caching files and remote actions at the same time.
Probably not perfect, but should work for now.
CouchDB was too slow and NFS is not reliable enough.