Use Write Caching to Optimize High Volume Data Driven Applications: ASP Alliance

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Use Write Caching to Optimize High Volume Data Driven Applications

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by Steven Smith
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Article Contents:

Summary

Hopefully, I’ve convinced you that write caching or batch updating can be a huge performance win for applications that must perform very frequent updates to a database, such as in a logging scenario. Figure 12 (the last figure, I promise!) shows a summary of the 6 scenarios and how the various metrics compare.

Figure 12: The Last Figure (with summary data from all tests)

Test	ASP.NET Requests/Sec	Sql Batch Requests/sec	TTLB (ms)
NoCache RemoteDB	9.14	91.86	103
NoCache LocalDB	84.15	420.74	7
ReadCache RemoteDB	13.85	84.54	67.43
ReadCache LocalDB	95.36	286.49	5.66
AllCache RemoteDB	113.1	1.24	3.95
AllCache LocalDB	118.52	0.6	3.52

In the course of finishing this article, I’ve become more and more interested in the MSMQ alternative. Hopefully at some point I’ll have time to investigate it, and probably write a follow-up article (or at least blog about it). However, for now, these results speak for themselves.

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User Comments

Title: Modern SQL XML Support
Name: Steve Smith
Date: 2008-08-08 2:33:41 PM
Comment:
Jason Follas posted recently on how to do the SQL XML work more efficiently in SQL 2005+:
http://jasonfollas.com/blog/archive/2008/06/19/coding-in-sql-server-an-evolution.aspx

Title: MSMQ
Name: Derek
Date: 2008-01-14 9:37:07 AM
Comment:
Thanks for the article. Having some experience with MSMQ I can tell you it will probably perform well, but we've had a lot of issues with using it in a clustered environment. This is a well-known shortcoming of MSMQ.

We've gone to some 3rd party pub-sub solutions that work much more efficiently and work well in a clustered environment.

Title: Using a synchronized HashTable
Name: Tim
Date: 2005-08-22 1:41:25 PM
Comment:
Also, how would this be affected by using Hashtable.Synchronized(...) to create the hashtable. It appears that automatically protects the hashtable's Add method and the indexing property Set accessor with a lock, which would protect you during writes.

Title: What about the code for updating the item in Cache?
Name: Tim
Date: 2005-08-22 12:08:14 PM
Comment:
Can you show sample code for updating the item in Cache? For example, if item is added to cache with certain expiration, etc., when you update it, do you have to add it back with the same parameters, or do you just reference it like Cache[myitem] = updatedValue, and it will retain all previously set values...

Thanks

Title: Programmer
Name: Microfolx
Date: 2005-05-21 10:33:19 AM
Comment:
This is a very nice site. Keep it up.

Title: Re: Consistency
Name: Brett
Date: 2005-05-20 5:15:54 PM
Comment:
Nice article... I might consider trying normal XML writers rather than StringBuilder. Or even XML serialization. Probably slightly slower, but reduces errors.

On the point regarding charging for page views. I have two suggestions. One is to periodically reload the current click count from the database and not worry about being exact. Hey if they get 1 million or 1,005,000, does it really matter? This isn't the space shuttle. The second would be to switch to a non-caching code path when you get close to whatever your maximum value is. So when you hit, say 990,000 views (based on your hit rate, etc.) then switch to the non-caching version for that customer.

Title: Consistency
Name: Brian
Date: 2005-05-20 2:03:29 PM
Comment:
I had to accomplish this exact same scenario. The problem I ran into was the caching. Lets say that one of your advertisers pays you to show their ad 1 million times. How can you insure that it doesn’t go over? If you are holding the most current counters in cache, won’t each process be looking at their own cache, not to mention each server in the web farm and all it’s processes be looking at their own cache.

Another general Cache question. When I write something to cache, isn’t it only available for that particular process? So if you setup your application to have 5 worker processes, won’t that have 5 separate cache entries?

Title: web farm
Name: parker
Date: 2005-04-24 3:19:08 AM
Comment:
How do you account for disperate sessions in a web farm scenario? Is the cache shared amoung the servers?

Title: Too Good
Name: Zulfiqar Damani
Date: 2005-04-18 12:46:36 AM
Comment:
It presented very well, also it was interesting too.

Title: Thanks
Name: Happel
Date: 2005-04-14 8:23:23 AM
Comment:
Thanks for sharing this article, very interesting.