Which choice for a business service

[AW]

Hello,

This is a technical/architecture question.

We are working on an ASP.Net application which uses business components.
These components need to be started before the first page's request, and
hold data in memory. They can reside on the same machine as the ASP.Net
application.

What implementation do you suggest? A Windows service? If so, can it run in
the same process boundary as the ASP.Net application, so that it is more
efficient? And how do we communicate with it (simple DLL call? remoting?).

Thanks for your suggestions.