How much of a performance hit is an XML-driven WebControl?

[afroblanca]

Here's the situation -

I'm writing a custom WebControl that accepts a number of parameters to determine how it behaves. Now, I could take accept these parameters through Properties in the WebControl itself. However, the number and complexity of the parameters would seem to necessitate a structured data format like XML. However, I'm concerned about performance. Assuming that this control lives on the homepage of a website, what kind of a performance hit could I expect if I have the control read its configuration data from an XML file? If the performance hit is significant, what steps can I take to mitigate this? I should mention that I'm not in favor of using any of .NET's server-side caching objects.

 

[DotNetBlocks]

When you add the webcontrol to your page declare it as shared. It will retain the data so you will only have to load it the first time, and then it can be used for all users, or you could cache the data that you want to put in the contorl so each user's webcontrol will be independet of the other users. This way you will have to hit the file for each user once.

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