Episerver Commerce performance optimization – part 2

Or lock or no lock – that’s the question.

This is the second part of the series on how can you improve the performance of Episerver Commerce site – or more precisely, to avoid the deadlocks and 100% CPU usage. This is not Commerce specific actually, and you can apply the knowledge and techniques here for a normal CMS site as well.

It’s a common and well-known best practice to store the slow-to-retrieve data in cache. These days memory is cheap – not free – but cheap. Yet it is still much faster than the fastest PCIe SSD in the market (if your site is running on traditional HDD, it’s not even close). And having objects in cache means you won’t have to open the connection to SQL Server, wait for it to read the data and send back to you – which all cost time. And if the object you need is a complex one, for example a Catalog content, you will also save the time needed to construct the object. Even if it’s fast, it is still not instantaneous, and it will cost you both memory and CPU cycles. All in all – caching is the right way to go. But how to get it right?

One common mistake for to have no lock when you load the data for the first time and insert it into cache.

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