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A High Performance Model for State and Caching

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Every Web application has to deal with session state in one way or another. Most default to the state management built into the environment of the language they’re using. It’s simple, quick, and in many cases effective.

The problem comes in when you’re trying to build a high volume site and the standard way of doing things just won’t cut it. Dumping everything into session state just doesn’t work; caching becomes a necessity. You’re forced to start bringing more things into memory per user—while simultaneously keeping your per-user memory utilization down. It is when caching is added to the performance mix that you begin to really see how your fundamental views of session state and caching need to shift.

In this article, I present a model for creating different pools of information tied to both, how the information is used and how expensive that information is to reproduce. I’ll detail a method for improving performance using careful management of state and cache.

A Tale of Three Pools

In the Web application world, there are three basic pools of information related to state and caching. They are:

  • Cache: Information that can be reproduced by persistent storage. Cache exists only because it improves performance. Cache, although a time proven technique, has the problem of cache coherency, as discussed later. Cache information is necessarily memory based and not persisted. It’s designed for speed, so the performance impact of reading it from a database is nearly always not worth it.
  • Session: Information that the user has entered during the session or data specific to the current session. This information isn’t available from other sources but doesn’t need to be persisted for long. It is disposable once the user’s session has ended. Sessions should have a short term persistence strategy—although many are still memory based and don’t have a persistence strategy at all.
  • User: User information is information that is related to the user, which may need to be accessed during a session but it’s different in that it is persisted for long periods of time. User information including user attributes, histories of orders, settings, and so on is stored with the user for the life of their account.

The key in any effort to manage session state is to determine what kind of information is really being managed. This is true because often cache information and session information are intermingled. Some of the information traditionally stored in a session is really cached information that can be regenerated if necessary.

Load Balancers Impact on Session

The most shocking experience that developers have when they first start to develop applications that need to be placed on a Web farm is the experience of a session shifting from one server to another server. This is because, even though they often believe that they’ve carefully stored away everything into a persisted storage, they are often see places where seemingly innocuous things have caused problems. All of a sudden, a two-page form breaks because the user was shifted from one server to another during the middle of the form.

Of course, there are settings on load balancers that anchor a user’s session to one server or another for the length of the session; however, these settings come at a cost of the load balancer not being able to truly balance the load well. Generally, it’s accepted that it’s a bad idea to lock a user’s session to one server or the other from a performance standpoint. This, of course, ignores what happens to the sessions should the server servicing a user go down—the user’s session is thrown away.

Load balancers, when set to distribute activity evenly across the servers, will quickly show places where session variables were not persisted and were accidentally shoved off into some sort of cache. Unfortunately, there isn’t anything that will show the reverse off so easily—it’s difficult to find the places where you’ve added cached data to the persisted session storage.

Load balancers are tremendously effective at spreading load if you’ve been able to properly plan for the kinds of data that you store, and can be really difficult to get working if you don’t.

Cache Characteristics

As mentioned above, cache is designed to be fast access to information that can be regenerated if necessary. That “if necessary” part may mean that the server becomes memory starved and needs the memory back for operations; it may mean the user has transitioned to a new server and the cached information doesn’t exist, an application pool was reset, or a variety of other reasons.

To make effective use of cache, you need to make it an integral part of the way the objects work. One of the most effective ways to do this is to use a singleton pattern where objects are constructed through a static method on the class rather than ‘new’ing an object. This is important because an object that has been instantiated is necessarily a new object. However, the object that you are handed back from a static method may be new, or it may be an object from cache.

Take, for instance, a catalog where you have products. It’s likely that the system will need a product several times. The object itself is mostly initiated from the database. During the execution, the user views the product, they add it to their cart, and they check out. In this most streamlined example, the user makes three state transitions (view, want to purchase, agree to purchase) and potentially many more pages as they put other items in their cart and they browse around the site, coming back to what they’ve already put in their cart to compare it.

Rather than creating a product object each time, you can create one product object, store it in cache, and fetch it each time that the application needs it. The static “GetProduct” method on the catalog class can look it up in cache and, if found, return it. If the product isn’t found in cache, the static method can create it and put it in the cache for next time.

This has the side benefit that, in this case, it’s possible to share the product object among multiple users so there may be 100 people with the new widget in their cart, but there will only be one copy of the object in memory at any one time. Of course, when you put it in cache you can decide whether or not you want it to be shared across all users.

This works really well for read-only objects, the kind that you don’t update, or you don’t update often. However, there’s a problem called cache coherency that occurs when the data can be updated. It is when the data in the cached copy of the object is out of sync with the real source of the data.

There are a few ways to approach this problem. Three are listed below:

  1. Ignore it: Although, on the surface, ignoring the problem may seem like a silly idea, it does have its place. Some problems aren’t worth fixing because the probability that they will cause a problem is too low. For instance, if you’re talking about updating the cache for the friendly name displayed on the site, there’s low chance of the data changing, there’s low impact of the data being out of sync causing real harm. It may not be worth fixing. Once of the techniques used to mitigate the problems is to reduce the cache time on cached objects so they don’t stay in cache that long. Because they aren’t in cache that long, the chances of a cache coherency problem is low. However, it limits the effectiveness of your cache as well because objects may expire before they can be used.
  2. Session Based Clearing: If the cached data relates specifically to the user, write a date/time to the session. Any cached data created before that date and time is invalidated when a check is performed. This is relatively straightforward to implement, but requires that the user initiate the change in the data. This isn’t always the case. For instance, in the product example above, the user isn’t likely to change pricing on a product they are using, but that change should be reflected.
  3. Farm Based Clearing: Somewhat more complicated is a technique that synchronizes all of the servers in the farm with one another. One approach to this is to expose a service for clearing the cache of an item. This service is called on every server in the farm every time an update is made to cached data. Alternatively, the caching system checks a centralized database to see whether the data has changed, or some other method that synchronizes the data. This is substantially more complicated, but may be necessary if cache coherency is a real problem.

Developing a strategy for how you deal with cache coherency issues is an important part of using cache.

Session Selections

Session data, data about the user’s current session isn’t necessarily something persistent, however, it is very important to the user for the short period of time that they are in the session. Because session data must be sticky even if the back end server is switched by a load balancer, it needs either to be persisted by a key held by the browser that leads to a database, or the browser needs to hold on to all of the data.

Most use the technique of the user holding on to a session key which leads them to the database. This is the approach that ASP.NET uses in its session management. It’s a good, safe way to manage session data but will be slightly slower than having direct memory access to the data. Of course, you can keep session data in process in memory if your storage requirements aren’t large and you don’t have more than one server—this won’t demonstrate the performance issues that may become apparent when you move to multiple servers. So, it may leave you with a nasty surprise down the road.

The alternative is to have the user’s browser store all of the information in the session. In other words, you make it the browser’s responsibility to store the information—in the form of a cookie. There are two primary issues with this approach. First, cookies are limited in their size. You won’t be able to store large amounts of data in cookies. Small bits of information are fine, but sizes larger than 8K are not supported, and more than about 2K of information isn’t recommended. The second issue is that this information may be stored unencrypted on the user’s disk. The problem here is that any sensitive data could be picked up by a malicious party.

Most people must settle on a key-based session because the performance impact is more than made up for by the extra security. However, one hybrid approach uses cookie-based session information for signaling the cache system to reset and key-based for the rest of the items.

User Profile

The final type of data is the user profile data. This is the standard information about the user. It doesn’t change whether they’re in one Web browser session or another; it’s about who the user is. User profile data is always persisted to a back end database. Most systems today have pre-built profile systems that can be integrated so the “heavy lifting” of profiles have largely been removed from the purview of the average developer. (Profile systems are so integrated into the way things work that ASP.NET 2.0 has a complete system built in.)

Conclusion

Putting objects in the right place can help performance in the short term, allowing your existing configuration to do more, as well as setting you up for larger horizontal scaling options with server farms. Learning how to effectively use caching as a technique can make your applications support more users and have better response times. Give some thought to what data you’re putting and where you are putting it the next time you design or build a system.

Robert Bogue, MCSE (NT4/W2K), MCSA:Security, A+, Network+, Server+, I-Net+, IT Project+, E-Biz+, CDIA+ has contributed to more than 100 book projects and numerous other publishing projects. He was recently honored to become a Microsoft MVP for Microsoft Commerce Server and before that Microsoft Windows Servers-Networking. Robert blogs at http://www.thorprojects.com/blog. You can reach Robert at Rob.Bogue@thorprojects.com.

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