Designing .NET Applications

The guidelines in this section will help you to optimize system performance when designing .NET applications.

Managing Connections

Connection management is important to application performance. Optimize your application by connecting once and using multiple statement objects, instead of performing multiple connections. Avoid connecting to a data source after establishing an initial connection.

You can improve performance significantly with connection pooling, especially for applications that connect over a network or through the World Wide Web. Connection pooling lets you reuse connections. Closing connections does not close the physical connection to the database. When an application requests a connection, an active connection is reused, thus avoiding the network I/O needed to create a new connection.

Pre-allocate connections. Decide what connection strings you will need to meet your needs. Remember that each unique connection string creates a new connection pool.

Once created, connection pools are not destroyed until the active process ends or the connection lifetime is exceeded. Maintenance of inactive or empty pools involves minimal system overhead.

Connection and statement handling should be addressed before implementation. Spending time and thoughtfully handling connection management improves application performance and maintainability.

Using Native Managed Providers

Bridges into unmanaged code, that is, code outside the .NET environment, adversely affect performance. Calling unmanaged code from managed code causes the data provider to be significantly slower than data providers that are completely managed code. Why take that kind of performance hit?

If you use a bridge, your code will be written for this bridge. Later, when a database-specific ADO.NET data provider becomes available, the code must be rewritten; you will have to rewrite object names, schema information, error handling, and parameters. You'll save valuable time and resources by coding to managed data providers instead of coding to the bridges.