Application state in ASP.NET - performance limitations?

Question

I have an application where I want two users to communicate with eachother.. This has to happen every second - and I have been considering a lot of solutions.

I had a thread some time ago , which gave some really good ideas. Problem is I don't want to get into reverse-AJAX yet as I am waiting for HTML 5 sockets.

Anyway, I "just" need to create a variety of features: Chat, 1 on 1 fight, people on a map and alike. For this, I see two obvious solutions:

• Database updates (read from DB every second)
• Using the global Application state

Which of these solutions are the best? Or do you have some even more magic neat solution?

Answer 1

I would look at MemCached . You can run it on a separate server and have multiple servers share if you need it to be. If you need it to be persistent -- there is MemCachedDB

Answer 2

There is a really great comet framework for that, it's dead easy to use and it also supports html 5 sockets (as well as normal reverse-AJAX). If persistence is not a requirement than I don't see any reasons not to use it. There are other free alternatives too, but none of them are using C# as far as I know.