How to store information in web app efficiently

Question

I have a ecommerce site which sells tours. For certain tours we connect to a 3rd party ticketing solution via HTTPWebRequest/HTTPWebResponse which is terribly slow. Previously we were making a call when the user clicked on a date. The overhead was horrible so I combined them into one single call when they go to a month and I'm storing the results for each day and pulling the individual day's worth of information out when I need it.

For development I put the info into a ViewState and everything is working ok but I know that is not the best place to put it. This data is around 56k worst case which is way too big to carry in a ViewState from my understanding. I'm sure this is also hurting performance and have seen that in execution.

What are alternative ways I can save the info so I don't have to query the calendar every date-click?

Note: The customers can open another tab and come back into the store so I don't want anything that is sticky beyond this instance like session memory or statics if at all possible to avoid.

Help appreciated.

Jim

Answer 1

I found a very good reference that lists the pros/cons of different state management techniques in ASP.NET. In summary: it really depends on the tradeoffs =P I hope it helps: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/z1hkazw7.aspx