ASP.NET and XML scalability

[tgreer]

I did search the forum first, and if this was addressed, I didn't see it. Apologies then if this is an oft-repeated / discussed topic.

The basic question is, how scalable is XML in an ASP.NET application?

If I have a read-only XML document that is used as part of a multi-user ASP.NET application, to populate for example, a web control, how scalable is that?

I know IIS / ASP.NET is great at caching and server HTML and GIF and JPEG etc files to lots of users, but what about an XML file?

Taking it further, if this XML document had to be queried (XPATH) and traversed, and so on, how scalable is that? In other words, used beyond simple data-binding, used much more like how one would traditionally use a database.

Thanks,



Thomas D. Greer

http://www.tgreer.com

Providing PostScript & PDF
Training, Development & Consulting

 

[chiph]

XML makes a really poor database. One reason is XPath, which does linear searches (at least in Microsoft's implementation). It's great for storing smaller (less than 100k) worth of data in a single-threaded environment, but once you have more than one thread reading/writing to it, you'll run into problems.

Chip H.


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