Take Advantage of Your Browser's Validation Abilities
Modern browsers have advanced support for features such as XML, DHTML, Java applets, and the Remote Data Service. Take advantage of these features whenever you can. All of these technologies can save round trips to the Web server by performing client-side validation as well as data caching. If you are running a smart browser, the browser is capable of doing some validation for you (for example, checking that a credit card has a valid checksum before executing POST). Again, take advantage of this whenever you can. By cutting down on client-server round trips, you'll reduce the stress on the Web server and cut down network traffic (though the initial page sent to the browser is likely to be larger), as well as any back-end resources that the server accesses. Furthermore, the user will not have to fetch new pages as often, improving the experience. This does not relieve you of the need to do server-side validation—you should always do server-side validation as well. This protects against bad data coming from the client for some reason, such as hacking, or browsers that don't run your client-side validation routines.
Much has been made of creating "browser-independent" HTML. This concern often discourages the developer from taking advantage of popular browser features that could benefit performance. For truly high-performance sites that must be concerned about browser "reach," a good strategy is to optimize pages for the popular browsers. Browser features can be easily detected in ASP using the Browser Capabilities Component. Tools such as Microsoft FrontPage can help you design code that works with the browsers and HTML versions you wish to target.
Enable Browser and Proxy Caching
By default, ASP disables caching in browsers and proxies. This makes sense since by nature an ASP page is dynamic with potentially time-sensitive information. If you have a page that doesn't require a refresh on every view, you should enable browser and proxy caching. This allows browsers and proxies to use a "cached" copy of a page for a certain length of time, which you can control. Caching can greatly alleviate load on your server and improve the user experience.
What kind of dynamic pages might be candidates for caching? Some examples are:
- A weather page, where the weather is only updated every 5 minutes.
- A home page listing news items or press releases, which are updated twice a day.
- A mutual fund performance listing, where underlying statistics are only updated every few hours.
Note that with browser or proxy caching, you'll get less hits recorded on your Web server. If you are trying to accurately measure all page views, or post advertising, you may not be happy with browser and proxy caching.
Browser caching is controlled by the HTTP "Expires" header, which is sent by a Web server to a browser. ASP provides two simple mechanisms to send this header. To set the page to expire at a certain number of minutes in the future, set the Response.Expires property. The following example tells the browser that the content expires in 10 minutes:
<% Response.Expires = 10 %>
Setting Response.Expires to a negative number or 0 disables caching. Be sure to use a large negative number, such as -1000 (a little more than a day), to work around mismatches between the clocks on the server and the browsers. A second property, Response.ExpiresAbsolute, allows you set the specific time at which the content will expire:
<% Response.ExpiresAbsolute = #May 31,2001 13:30:15# %>
Rather than using the Response object to set expiration, you can write a <meta> tag into the HTML, usually within the <HEAD> section of the HTML file. Some browsers will respect this directive, although proxies will not.
<meta equiv="Expires" value="May 31,2001 13:30:15">
Finally, you can indicate whether the content is valid for an HTTP proxy to cache, using the Response.CacheControl property. Setting this property to "Public" enables proxies to cache the content.
<% Response.CacheControl = "Public" %>
By default, this property is set to "Private." Note that you should not enable proxy caching for pages that show data specific to a user, as the proxy may serve pages to users that belong to other users.
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