Dave;

Thank you for your input. By the way the gods at our corporation make all the decisions. The network god, the tools god, and the data base gods (several backends are in use). None of the gods has ever created an application but I have been doing this for 20 years as either file server, client server or web based as of the last five years.

My major application for our Intranet (will be an Internet app some day soon) has 35 users. When our suppliers have access to it it will have several hundred users. The application controls the quality rating of suppliers and can be worth hundreds of millions of dollars in contracts.

I do not like using Visual Interdev 6.0 and ASP for this application but the tool god has to have his way. Since I want to support my family I have sold my soul or something like that. :)

I am going to stick with my INCLUDE files and end the connection as I have always done. The good thing is I do not have to change my code - as that is how I wrote the application. I did try the global.asa file and found it is fragile - it broke the connection several times on test forms. Not good!

Again thank you for your input.

Tom


>>I have been programming for a number of years and use all the major backends. >This is a question about connections. I was taught to make a connection and >then end it as quickly as possible. Now our network/SQL Server administrator >has suggested keeping open one connection and not closing it until a person >closes the ASP application.
>
>I think your intuition is right, his is wrong. How long has your network administrator been developing distributed Internet applications? :)
>
>The internet is stateless. Someone clicks your page. Your ASP gets a connection, returns the results and drops the connection. If one user keeps the connection open how do you ever hope to scale? You *should* use connection pooling so that when you disconnect, the operating system keeps the connection for the next request, but this is invisible to the programmer.
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>If you are worried about performance, you can store lookup tables as XML in your application or session variables.
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>With .NET, the tables are reversed, so to speak. ADO.NET Datasets are safe to be stored in session variables (because they are XML) and ASP.NET keeps viewstate for your Web forms so you don't have to create hidden form inputs. But the connection to the database still gets closed when it is not needed.
>
>-Dave