When do asp.net role providers live and die?

Question

I am working with a custom role provider in asp.net and it appears that once the provider is loaded into memory, it doesn't drop out of memory until the web application is restarted (like when the web.config file is changed and saved). Further, all of the requests to that web application seem to utilize the one instance of the role provider.

So my question is: When does asp.net create instances of role providers? And what is their life span? When does asp.net create new instances? And is there a way to force asp.net to refresh the current provider instance by dropping the old instance and creating a new one?

Answer 1

The design of ASP.NET assumes the providers are stateless objects. Therefore, you should design your provider in a manner that you won't need to know about when it is created and when it dies. Basically, if you really want to do that, you could put the actual logic in a different class that its creation and disposal will be handled by a proxy class that you introduce to ASP.NET.

Also, ASP.NET does not guarantee when it will create the role provider object. It's something like static constructors. You should only rely on the fact that they do exist whenever they are needed.