is Silverlight more friendly to load-balancing than ASP.NET?

Question

I was discussing load-balancing with a colleague at lunch. I admit that I know very little about this topic. We were discussing the various ways of maintaing session in a ASP.NET application -- none of which suited the high performance load balancing that he was looking for.

What about Silverlight? says I. As far as I know it is stateless, you've got the app running in the browser and you've got services on the server that feed/process data.

Does Silverlight totally negate the need for Session state management? Is it more friendly to load-balancing? Is it something in between?

Answer 1

I'd say it depends on your application. If it's a banking application,then yes I want something timingout out after 5 minutes and asking for my password again. If it's facebook then not so much.

Answer 2

I would say that Silverlight is likely to be a little more load-balancer friendly than ASP.NET. You have much more sophisticated mechanisms for maintaining state (such as isolated local storage), and pretty much, you only need to talk to the server when (a) you initially download the application, and then (b) when you make a web service call to retrieve or update data. It's analogous in this sense to an Ajax application written entirely in C#.

To put it another way, so long as either (a) your server-side persistence layer knows who your client is, or (b) you pass in all relevant data on each WCF call, it doesn't matter which web server instance the call goes to. You don't have to muck about with firewall-level persistence to make sure your HTTP call goes back to the right web server.

Answer 3

Silverlight depends on XMLHttpRequest like any other ajax impelementation and is therefore capable of maintaining a session, forms authentiction, roles, profiles etc etc.

The benefit you are getting is obviating virtually all of the traffic. json requests are negligable compared to serving pages. Even the .xap can be cached on the client.

I would say you are getting the best of both worlds in regards to your question.