Question

Improving the performance of an inventory management system

You are working at a company that has a custom inventory management system that has been used for years. Company personnel recently completed an overhaul of the web-based application that provides access into the system. Although they are comfortable with the look, feel, and usability of the application, they are unhappy with the performance, even after updating all their users to the most recent hardware equipment and software. They find that every interaction with the server is taking seconds. At times, this renders the application almost unusable. When you look into the application, you see that all the models in the MVC structure do calls into the database whenever they need data, even down to the level of the user’s name, shift, and building, which are calls into different tables and displayed on every page the user visits.

As you look into the system more carefully, you see 15 calls into the database for every time a page is rendered that is strictly to provide basically static information to the page. How could you use caching to improve this?

After you have eliminated the redundant calls, you see that the application makes calls into the database for every request to get supporting information such as colors, product sizes, and box sizes. The application gets the complete list from the database every time and then gets the necessary size, color, and so on from that longer listing. How could caching be used to help this process?