ASP.NET : Killer Viewstate Invasion

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"They can hold all the peace talks they want, but there will never be peace in the Middle East. Billions of years from now, when Earth is hurtling toward the Sun and there is nothing left alive on the planet except a few microorganisms, the microorganisms living in the Middle East will be bitter enemies."
-- Dave Barry

Recently I was "trying out" some pages on my latest creation, BlogMetaFinder.com, and I noticed that paging of the Gridview on the main page was slow. Long story short -- View Source and I've got 975,000 bytes (In EditPlus, "Edit / Character Count") mostly all ViewState. "Yikes", I thought, "if I turn this off I'm gonna have to do custom paging with this SQLDataSource and all kinds of extra stuff". The data source is a little less than 2500 rows now, which is kind of "on the edge" of where you might not want to use the default paging in a GridView.

Anyway, I turned off ViewState in that Page and also in the Master, which was also contributing to FVS (Fat ViewState) and everything still works fine. I've written about this a couple of times (here's one article) and I could kick myself for forgetting about it.

Custom paging is a lot easier to do now with SQL Server 2005 because you've got the ROW_NUMBER feature, and there is plenty of sample code on how to do it. SQLDataSource doesn't play well with it though, you need to use the ObjectDataSource. Obviously, if you aren't using ObjectDataSource and you need to put in custom paging, there's going to be some serious refactoring going on...

Bottom Line? Watch that ViewState. Most of the time, you don't even need it. Turn it off selectively on various controls. Lightens up the page quite nicely. ViewState is downright evil!

Peter has been active on the C# and other MS newsgroups, has had samples at gotdotnet.com (now codegallery.com) that have been downloaded over 56,000 times, and has written numerous articles for eggheadcafe.com, for which he is a co-founder, and MSDNAA sites. He has also been a technical reviewer on books from Prentice Hall, Manning and other publishers. Peter was a Microsoft MVP for 10 years. Peter was born and raised in New York City, and after a stint as a jazz musician playing contrabass with the Robert Hunt Trio, migrated to sunny Florida, where he was hired as a rookie Financial Consultant at Merrill Lynch in Orlando, specializing in Corporate Services. It was at Merrill that Peter realized computers and technology were his forte. He spent his last few years at Merrill developing real – time computerized trading and and stock charting program using advanced technical analysis indicators, some of which are his own inventions. In 1997, he moved on to architect and serve as lead developer on a number of innovative web-based and middleware solutions for the healthcare and financial services industry.

Comments

  1. SteveB5:54 AM

    Hi Peter,

    Wasn't sure where to post this, but I wanted to point out that in the code solution you provide along with the excellent article linked below...

    Storing viewstate server side...there seems to be an issue in the viewstatemngr class, where you declare....

    private static string SESSION_VIEW_STATE_MGR=System.Web.HttpContext.Current.Session.SessionID.ToString();

    ** please note I am not an expert coder or anything, and I ported this code to vb.net. (so might be a vb.net specific issue) However I found that as its declared static / shared it only uses the first sessionid that is passed, so therefore you only have one cached viewstatemng instance per application as opposed to per user.

    I did not notice this when testing locally, however when it was used by multiusers, the viewstate would not be accurate and the buttons had to be clicked multiple times to submit.

    I changed all references to SESSION_VIEW_STATE_MGR

    to being the actual instance sessionid and is working fine.

    Again, I think this is an excellent article and i ironically sufferred from copying/pasting and trusting an internet source as oppossed to actually analysing the code in detail, In addition, the problem was not initially evident as I like most cowboy developers tested in a single user environ and expected it to work equally well.

    Thanks again for the article...

    ReplyDelete

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