The requirement is to display a page with some categories just like the yahoo homepage. The link of each main category will have to show the subcategories of that category in a similar page. The level of this tree goes one more level inside. All this information is built ofcourse by retrieving from the database.
First thought was to build the relevant section of the category/subcategory tree based on the request parameters. Since these pages are going to be the "most viewed" (and does not change based on the user), I thought it would be better for performance if the whole tree is created in a startup servlet and put in servlet context instead of creating a part of it in the Action class and setting it into the HttpServletRequest. This would mean that I wont have to hit the database for every user request. I will just have to get the relevant part of the category tree from the (big) object in servlet context based on a key lookup on the TreeMap. The pages load surely very fast, ~but~ I am wary of such a big object in memory and its effect on the performance once it goes into production. To give a rough idea about the size of this tree: 1 main category (TreeMap) has about 12 subcategories (TreeMaps again). Each of the subcategories has about 10 child categories. Each child category is a ArrayList of strings. So its a TreeMap of TreeMaps of ArrayLists. Did anybody face similar design choice and had to choose against a setting so much information in the servlet context? Any input is greatly appreciated! I apologize for the subject being a little off-topic. Thanks, -Shyam Gouri -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> For additional commands, e-mail: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
