Relying on nhibernate's second level cache vs pushing objects into asp.net session

Question

I have some big entities which are frequently accessed in the same session. For example, in my application there is a reporting page which consist of dynamically generated chart images. For each chart image on this page, the client makes requests to corresponding controller and the controller generates images using some entities. I can either use asp.net's session dictionary for "caching" those entities or rely on nhibernate's second level cache support with using cached queries for example.

What is your opinion?

By the way I will use shared hosting, is nhibernate's second level cache hosting friendly?

Thanks.

Answer 1

I think you should use NHibernate's cache. If user makes distinct request to get each entity one by one then you probably should use different NHibernate ISession implementations to get them (bacause of session per web request strategy).

Also when using Nhibernate cache you won't have troubles with concurrency issues - it will handle them for you.