How do you access in-memory services from web applications?

Question

Say I need to design an in-memory service because of a very high load read/write system. I want to dump the results of the objects every 2 minutes. How would I access the in-memory objects/data from within a web application?

(I was thinking a Windows service would be running in the background handling the in-memory service etc.)

I want the fastest possible solution, and I would guess most people would say use a web service? What other options would I have? I just don't understand how I could hook into the Windows service's objects etc.

(Please don't ask why I would want to do this, maybe you're right and it's a bad idea but I am also curious if this type of architecture is possible.)

Update

I was looking at this site swoopo.com that I would think has a lot of hits near the end of auctions, but since the auction keeps resetting the hits to the database would be just crazy so I was thinking if they did it in memory then dumped to db every x minutes...

Answer 1

Any remoting technology would work such as sockets, pipes and the like.

Check out: www.remobjects.com

Answer 2

What you're describing is called a cache, with a facade front-end.

You write a facade to which you commit your changes and acquire your datasets. The facade queues up reads and writes and commits when the queue is full or after a certain amount of time has passed. Your web application has a single point of access to the data (the facade), and the facade is structured in such a way to avoid writing and reading from storage too often.

Most relational database management systems do this for you. They do this kind of optimization and queuing internally so writing another layer on top of it would only slow things down. So don't write a cache if you're using an RDBMS.

Regarding the specifics of accessing such a facade, you can treat it as just an object, and implement it however you want (its own thread, a thread pool, a Web service, a Windows service, whatever).

Answer 3

You could hook into the Windows Services objects by using Remoting or WCF, both offer very fast interprocess communication. Sockets are fast too but are more cumbersome to program compared to WCF. There is a ton of WCF documentation and support online.

Databases provide a level of caching for you. The advantage of an in memory golden copy such as the one you propose is that it never has to read from disk when a request comes in and if you host it on the same machine as your IIS (provided you have enough RAM for both) there is no extra network hop, making it much faster that querying a db. However, the downside to this approach is that it does not scale as well if you need to add machines to load balance.

Third party messaging providers such as TIBCO are also worth looking at.

Answer 4

You could use a Windows Message Queues or a Service Bus, or even .NET remoting. See http://www.nservicebus.com/, or http://code.google.com/p/masstransit/.