Archives

Archives / 2003 / November
  • The trouble with web.config

    Am I the only one that has issues with the way web.config is implemented in ASP.NET web apps and web services? The idea of a central, extensible XML config file that automatically detects changes is a great one. But the fact that ASP.NET restarts the application any time the file changes - isn't that a little heavy handed? I realize that it tries to handle the restart as gracefully as possible, spinning up a new instance of the application while allowing the old one to die out after it processes any pending requests. But restarting the application has a couple of nasty effects - namely, the application loses its cache and in-memory session state. In my case, the web service that I work on stores a bunch of data in cache that can be expensive to fetch. Dumping the cache can have a significant performance impact as the server rebuilds it.