If data caching used like a session would it have better performance

Question

I am working on a maintenance of one asp.net application where I found pervious developers have implemented data caching as like a session, means they stored data in a cache for per session like this

Public Function GetDataCache(ByVal dataCacheKey As String) As Object
    dataCacheKey = dataCacheKey & Convert.ToString(LoginSessionDO.UserID) 
    Return Cache(dataCacheKey)
End Function

In this application there are many screens where user can add multiple rows (data) in a grid temporary which actually store in cache for that particular current user only and finally press save button to save data in database.

My question is if caching is used like a session! will it give any performance improvement? actually I can change it in my dev. environment to check performance but we cannot create load like prod in our environment and also without any surety I cannot change and deploy code in production.

Please suggest me

1. Is caching is good the way its implemented?.
2. It's using like a session would it have better performance than session?

Answer 1

The cache will need to be cleared out, otherwise all items will remain until the app domain recycles. Session has a much shorter expiry and can be explicitly abandoned on log out, for example.

This might be a scaling issue if your site grows. However, the shorter expiry time of the session might cause you issues with saving if it is no longer there when expected. A staging table in the db might be a better approach.

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An edit from several years after the initial answer.

In reality, it would be much preferable to store the added rows on the client side and then submit them all in one go. Either of the server side options above run into issues if the app domain recycles in the middle of a session and both will cause you scaling issues on the server with enough users/data.