Is WCF the way to go for this ?

Question

Hello I am trying to figure out what type of technology I need to get a specific task done.. here is what i am doing.. I would like to create some sort of service on a server that many users can access from the web but I don't want the service to be reconstructed each web request. The service will have many large objects that I am pulling from databases and other sources and I cant afford to pull in all the datasources each request. I need the service to load the necessary objects when it is initially started on the server and then the user can access these objects efficiently. I am looking at WCF and seeing if it will help me achieve this.. Can someone guide me in the right direction? Drew

Mahesh Chand · Answer

You can use a WCF service. Similar data which you think more than one user will access you can store in Application State. But you have to keep an eye and clear this when you think you may not need it anymore. For example if you have a table you can probably store the whole table in App state and filter data based on user queries. This solution may be a problem if data is too large and number of users are a lot. You may also want to look at JQuery and/or LINQ solution. They provide asycn access of data and are much faster.

Drew · Answer

It could run from IIS i just assumed it would not stay in memory and would be created each request. I was considering publishing the WCF service in a console app as described here . An SSD might solve my problem but if i ever wanted someone else to use the app I cant assume they to would have an SSD. Basically I need to cache my object in some WCF service so I can hit it over and over again and its not reconstructed for maximum optimization. Drew

Sam Hobbs · Answer

No a console application would not be appropriate. Is this an IIS server or Apache? I assume IIS but if you could confirm that then that would help. I am not sure I can help you but hopefully someone can. For IIS you will probably use some type of DLL instead of a console program. If you don't mind a wild suggestion Solid State Drives (SSDs) are becoming affordable and if you use one of them you won't see a performance degradation if the data is accessed from the drive whenever needed.

Drew · Answer

Its geospatial data that will be stored in the objects... basically large amounts of geometry. The data sent back to the client will not be the same each time it will be dynamically derived from the methods parameters. I am now wondering if i can have some sort of console application running on the server that loads all the data i need initially and providing some sort of WCF service to get to that app. I am a little lost on how to approach it so I am still open to idea. Thanks for the response. Drew

Mahesh Chand · Answer

What are these objects? Is this data image or what? If output of these objects is same no matter how many users access them you may want to store them somewhere (either in the application state in memory or in persistent state) and WCF service can access from there instead of getting every time from the database. As per connectivity on the Web goes WCF service is perfect.