Comments on: Reducing ViewState Size

By: Larry

Larry — Thu, 03 Jun 2010 14:22:20 +0000

I realize that this post is old, but if it is still being monitored, can someone point me in the right direction to overcome the authors observation: ‘But you do need to be aware of the fact that using the CompressedStateFormatter when inheriting from SessionPageStatePersister will only result in compressing the little bit of ViewState that is included in the HTML, and not the ViewState that is stored in the HttpSessionState’. I want to compress the data that is saved in session. Thx.

By: Erik O'Leary

Erik O'Leary — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 15:17:43 +0000

FYI, I was able to make the compression ratio even better (yours reduced my pages Viewstate from 31% to 13%, but I was able to reduce it to 6-7%) by simply refactoring your code a little bit and removing the unnecessary streamreaders and streamwriters (GZipSteam apparently doesn’t like them!).

By: Davy Brion

Davy Brion — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 13:41:23 +0000

@Luke

very weird… in our case, only one page had a bigger compressed viewstate than uncompressed and it was our LogIn page (which hardly has any viewstate). In other pages, we noticed huge differences, some minor, some moderate, etc…

By: Luke

Luke — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 13:28:41 +0000

I tried this out on a test version of a production site and I’ve yet to find a page that has a smaller viewstate compressed than uncompressed…

I got closer to the normal viewstate size by using a binary formatter and gzip compression, but it was still larger than uncompressed. Am I doing something wrong or are other people finding this too? Its an ASP.NET 2 site.

By: Davy Brion

Davy Brion — Sun, 06 Sep 2009 10:42:21 +0000

@Jaime

search the post for “In case you’re wondering: why should i use this instead of using typical HTTP compression on the IIS level?”

By: Davy Brion

Davy Brion — Sun, 06 Sep 2009 10:32:31 +0000

@Shou

i didn’t know about those methods, and they certainly seem like a fine solution

By: Jaime

Jaime — Sun, 06 Sep 2009 04:14:41 +0000

Is there any advantage of using this method against using gzip at IIS level (since IIS will gzip the html with the viewstate in it). Are the advantages in using both?

By: Shou Takenaka

Shou Takenaka — Sat, 05 Sep 2009 17:16:17 +0000

If you use LoadPageStateFromPersistenceMedium() and SavePageStateToPersistenceMedium(), I think your implementation would be simpler (e.g. How To: Compress ViewState in ASP.NET 2.0). Do these method not meet your needs ?

By: Davy Brion

Davy Brion — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 14:40:57 +0000

It’s definitely an option, though it might be a bit extreme. I also considered it, but i’d rather not do that unless it’s absolutely necessary.

I’d do the cleanup in some maintenance plan instead of some asynchronous event though

By: John

John — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 13:52:07 +0000

Any thought about storing the viewstate in a database? I realize this creates extra round trips to the database for the viewstate on each page, but the round trip should be less then downloading and uploading the viewstate even in compressed form. A cleanup routine could be fired Asynchronously with each request to remove expired viewstates or part of a server maintenance plan.

By: Davy Brion

Davy Brion — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 16:56:29 +0000

i actually mentioned the SessionPageStatePersister in the post

and storing all of the ViewState in the session isn’t very good either… by default, it holds a queue of the last 9 ViewStates per user… if you get a lot of concurrent users, and you have a lot of ViewState, the memory overhead will be pretty big. Especially since the session memory won’t be removed until the session timeout is reached which is about 20 minutes (i think that’s the default setting) _after_ a user’s last action on your site.

By: Phil Pursglove

Phil Pursglove — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 14:29:10 +0000

If you think that's good, have a look at the SessionPageStatePersister which holds all your ViewState/ControlState in session on the web server and doesn't transmit it to the client at all...

By: Reflective Perspective - Chris Alcock » The Morning Brew #424

Reflective Perspective - Chris Alcock » The Morning Brew #424 — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 07:26:40 +0000

[...] Reducing ViewState Size – Davy Brion shows how you can replace the StateFormatter implementation with your own implementation to give you control over the output of the viewstate of an ASP.NET page, allowing you to do things like compression to reduce size [...]