Is the kind of ViewState sent on pages like Woot's forums a mistake?

Question

Not to name names, but for example, every pageview on all of Woot's forum pages (across four subdomains) returns a hidden __VIEWSTATE value that is about 54KB big.

<input type="hidden" name="__VIEWSTATE" id="__VIEWSTATE" value="/wEPDwULLTIxMDUyNjY3MjAPZBYCZg9kFgJmD2QWAmYPZBYEAgEPZBYCAgEPFQERLi4vQmxvZy9GZWVkLmFzaHh
kAgMPFgIeBWNsYXNzBQljb21tdW5pdHkWCAIBDxYGHgRocmVmBRpodHRwOi8vc2hvcHBpbmcueWFob28uY29tLx4Ja
... about 55,000 characters later ...
XNweCNxOCI+SG93IGRvIEkgcmV0dXJuIGEgZGVmZWN0aXZlIHByb2R1Y3Q/PC9hPjwvbGk+DQo8L3VsPmRkJUr78qEqw4o
bS8B4e2RCjO08Nsg=" />

Would you guess that this is helping their servers by offloading something from being stored in the session, and possibly a DB backed session, or is this hurting their servers, and possibly all embedded sized clients, by being a big huge block of text? It does form about 1/3 of the total pageload.

In either case, do they probably need it?

Answer 1

if the viewstate is as big as you have mentioned I think the designers have not taken this into consideration before implementation.

Answer 2

The viewstate in ASP.NET pages can be even bigger than this. It can seriously increase the size of the page if the developer doesn't understand what it is and how to use it.

The new MVC application in ASP.NET doesn't use viewstate.

The viewstate is used to to track the state of the ASP.NET controls on the page and can also contain big chunks of data that is in those controls.

Answer 3

Just use an online viewstate decoder to see what they are storing. It looks like they are storing the dataset for the page.