Best way to pass data between websites

[Duncan Welch]

I'm working with 4 websites running on the same box with seperate IIS sites
(I can't change this) - 3 that display information from a database, and one
that collects it and writes to the same database.

They all use the same DLL as a data layer, which also does database caching
using the Application object. The first problem I have is I have 4
instances of the DLL which dont talk to each other, so all information is
stored 4 times, and I have a far higher overhead than I feel is necessary.
I've been looking into putting the DLL into the GAC, but I get the
impression I'll still get 4 seperate instances of the data.

The second problem; when someone enters new data in the "collection" site, I
need to send data to the display sites to tell them to recache the changed
data. At present, I'm using either a web service (slow with high overhead)
or querystring (messy).

I'm sure my situation isn't unique; could someone please give me a few
suggestions for best practice for doing this type of thing?

Thanks in advance,

Duncan

 

[Marina]

If you use the GAC you will still 4 copies of the data - you will have just
1 copy of the DLL on your box.

One idea is to have a file that has the data the sites need to display
(maybe in XML form).

Site #4 updates this file, and the other 3 sites have FileSystemWatcher
objects that watch for changes in the file. When the file is updated, they
update their local data cache.

If your data changes infrequently, this is OK. If your data changes
frequently, I would recommend each site just going after the data directly
in the database each time it is needed.

 

[Duncan Welch]

Thanks, unfortunately, there's a high number of tables being cached, and
some of the sites are getting quite high usage at peak times, so that
probably isn't the best option.

Duncan