Managing memory scalability in web A study in efficient inter-process memory usage

Abstract

With web applications being more and more complex the need for data caching grows larger. When running ASP.NET applications under Internet Information Services in Microsoft Windows it is recommended to run the application in a web farm. This is because it allows multiple requests to be handled simultaneous. Problems emerge when these processes needs to share common data with each other since two processes cannot read each other’s memory in Microsoft Windows. Since each process has to allocate memory for the data caching individually this creates a negative impact on scalability. This study concludes that a shared memory solution using memory mapped files is the most efficient solution regarding scalability and overall performance.