CODEWITHSUNDEEP
c#asp.netasp.net-mvcimagerazor
Adrian Carr
Adrian Carr

Reputation: 3133

ASP.NET MVC Displaying Multiple Images from Database. How to- Efficiently

I've got a .NET MVC app where I need to display a list of images with some text. The images and text are stored in the database in the same table, and returned in my simple model. What I haven't figured out is how to display all of these images without hitting the database again for every single image.

I see several examples, such as:

and others, but they all go back to the database for every image. That doesn't make sense, because there could be dozens of images, and I don't want to keep making single calls to the database when I already have the image data returned in my model.

I'm new to ASP.NET MVC, (and also never worked with images stored in a DB before) and I think I am just missing something, and that it can't be this difficult. If anyone has solved this, I'd love to hear it, and I think others would too, based on the other questions already here.

Upvotes: 1

Views: 3670

Answers (3)

Stilgar
Stilgar

Reputation: 23611

Just hit the database multiple times. I once thought it was a clever idea to load the images together with the text in the cache and then invalidate the cache when they were served. I also had to generate random URLs to avoid different users invalidating each others cache. I thought it was so clever to reduce the number of DB queries.

I am now so ashamed by this "cleverness" and I don't tell anybody. Don't think about it unless you have actual performance problem.

It is important to implement client side caching by setting the appropriate headers. Images are better cached on the client than on the server because even if you cache on the server you still take the network transfer hit if you do not cache on the client.

Also hitting the database by primary key (I assume this is how you are going to retreive images) is not an expensive operation and unless the images are 2MB+ I wouldn't worry about transfer from the database to the web server either.

Edit: And I just told everybody about my shame :(

Upvotes: 4

harriyott
harriyott

Reputation: 10645

I'd recommend looking at ASP.NET caching. You can fetch the images from the database once, and keep them in the cache. Subsequent requests will get them from the cache until it expires.

Upvotes: 0

Wiktor Zychla
Wiktor Zychla

Reputation: 48314

You could have a cache of retrieved images, stored in a shared container (like the Application).

When users ask for a view containing images, you retrieve them and store in the cache. Then come requests for images and you can just retrieve them from the memory, without hitting the database.

The exact implementation depends on your specific scenario, you can limit the number of images stored in the cache, make the cache drop data automatically after some time or even use another server container (Session for example).

Anyway - returning data retrieved earlier always involves some kind of caching at the server side and should not be especially difficult to implement.

Upvotes: 2

Related Questions