Friday, 24 July 2009

TBarCode .NET in an IIS 7.0 Web Farm

If you use TBarCode ASP.NET Web Control in a Web Farm you may encounter the following exception:

  • Exception Type: System.ApplicationException
    Message: The requested image is no longer cached.

The TBarCode ASP.NET Web Control uses the HttpContext.Cache object to store the generated barcode image. Since http requests are load balanced within a web farm it can occur that a specific Web Control receives a request for an image, which has been generated on a different application server (and therefore is not available in its local cache).

To overcome this problem you could:

  • Synchronize the HttpContext.Cache object on all servers in the web farm (distributed caches). This could be done with extra programming or additional third party software.

  • or simply use Client Affinity in IIS 7.0 (recommended)

Having client affinity enabled all requests are tagged with a cookie so that subsequent requests (from the same client) are routed to the same server in the web farm.

Details see Application Request Routing (3 - Configure Client Affinity)

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