Are singletons automatically persisted between requests in ASP.NET MVC?

Question

I have a lookup table (LUT) of thousands integers that I use on a fair amount of requests to compute stuff based on what was fetched from database.

If I simply create a standard singleton to hold the LUT, is it automatically persisted between requests or do I specifically need to push it to the Application state?

If they are automatically persisted, then what is the difference storing them with the Application state?

How would a correct singleton implementation look like? It doesn't need to be lazily initialized, but it needs to be thread-safe (thousands of theoretical users per server instance) and have good performance.

EDIT: Jon Skeet's 4th version looks promising http://csharpindepth.com/Articles/General/Singleton.aspx

public sealed class Singleton
{
    static readonly Singleton instance=new Singleton();

    // Explicit static constructor to tell C# compiler
    // not to mark type as beforefieldinit
    static Singleton()
    {
    }

    Singleton()
    {
    }

    public static Singleton Instance
    {
        get
        {
            return instance;
        }
    }

    // randomguy's specific stuff. Does this look good to you?
    private int[] lut = new int[5000];

    public int Compute(Product p) {
        return lut[p.Goo];
    }
}

Answer 1

I wouldn't rely on a static being persisted between requests. [There is always the, albeit unlikely, chance that the process would be reset between requests.] I'd recommend HttpContext's Cache object for persisting shared resources between requests.

Answer 2

Yes, static members persists (not the same thing as persisted - it's not "saved", it never goes away), which would include implementations of a singleton. You get a degree of lazy initialisation for free, as if it's created in a static assignment or static constructor, it won't be called until the relevant class is first used. That creation locks by default, but all other uses would have to be threadsafe as you say. Given the degree of concurrency involved, then unless the singleton was going to be immutable (your look-up table doesn't change for application lifetime) you would have to be very careful as to how you update it (one way is a fake singleton - on update you create a new object and then lock around assigning it to replace the current value; not strictly a singleton though it looks like one "from the outside").

The big danger is that anything introducing global state is suspect, and especially when dealing with a stateless protocol like the web. It can be used well though, especially as an in-memory cache of permanent or near-permanent data, particularly if it involves an object graph that cannot be easily obtained quickly from a database.

The pitfalls are considerable though, so be careful. In particular, the risk of locking issues cannot be understated.

Edit, to match the edit in the question:

My big concern would be how the array gets initialised. Clearly this example is incomplete as it'll only ever have 0 for each item. If it gets set at initialisation and is the read-only, then fine. If it's mutable, then be very, very careful about your threading.

Also be aware of the negative effect of too many such look-ups on scaling. While you save for mosts requests in having pre-calculation, the effect is to have a period of very heavy work when the singleton is updated. A long-ish start-up will likely be tolerable (as it won't be very often), but arbitrary slow downs happening afterwards can be tricky to trace to their source.

Answer 3

Edit: See Jon's comments about read-only locking.

It's been a while since I've dealt with singleton's (I prefer letting my IOC container deal with lifetimes), but here's how you can handle the thread-safety issues. You'll need to lock around anything that mutates the state of the singleton. Read only operations, like your Compute(int) won't need locking.

// I typically create one lock per collection, but you really need one per set of atomic operations; if you ever modify two collections together, use one lock.
private object lutLock = new object();
private int[] lut = new int[5000];

public int Compute(Product p) {
    return lut[p.Goo];
}

public void SetValue(int index, int value)
{
    //lock as little code as possible. since this step is read only we don't lock it.
    if(index < 0 || index > lut.Length)
    {
        throw new ArgumentException("Index not in range", "index");
    }
    // going to mutate state so we need a lock now
    lock(lutLock)
    {
        lut[index] = value;
    }
}