Optimize ASP.NET Performance with View State Caching

By Iqbal Khan

ASP.NET View State does come with a few issues that you need to understand and resolve. Once you resolve these issues, you are able to benefit from ASP.NET View State without any problems. This tip outlines View State problems and a respective mechanism for how to deal with them.

Introduction

ASP.NET View State is a very powerful feature of ASP.NET that provides a client side state management mechanism. It helps preserve page and control values between complete round trips for client requests. This gives a state full programming capability over a stateless protocol such as HTTP.

ASP.NET View State is stored in a hidden field on the page as an encoded Base64 string, as part of every response sent to the client and is also returned to the server by the client as part of a post back.

Problems with ASP.NET View State

ASP.NET View State does come with a few issues that you need to understand and resolve. Once you resolve these issues, you are able to benefit from ASP.NET View State without any problems. They are discussed below.

1. ASP.NET View State is Often Heavy

First of all, in many situations, ASP.NET View State becomes very large especially when your ASP.NET application has a lot of rich and heavy controls and widgets on its pages. This results in a lot of data traveling back and forth between your browser and the web server.

Due to this heavy payload, your ASP.NET performance drops because your pages are taking longer to respond. This is probably the most visible change you see in your ASP.NET application.