I was looking at one of our legacy applications (ASP.NET 1.1/2.0 Web App) and had a tool to do a count of all key/value pairs. It seems that across 11 config files for the legacy application (app, web, data, and a bunch of custom config files) I found 1172 keys. I assume that some keys are no longer used and I wanted to convince the managers to do a clean-up. When I mentioned the total count I saw a bit of shock, but they saw no reason to go back and do a cleanup as they wanted proof that the site is really slower due to this. So my question is, it it slower (all this needs to get loaded in memory)? Is there any documentation? Anyone have any thoughts on the number of "acceptable" keys for one config file and for an application in general?
+2
A:
If these key/value pairs are stored in AppSettings the values will be cached so they won't cause any performance degradation.
As long as your keys are not redundant and are actually referenced within the application, there really is no reason to get rid of them.
John Rasch
2009-02-23 16:13:39