Rolosoft Geo IP.NET can optionally run using a remote Webservice for its IP / Country lookups. The benefit of this model is that there are no database files to download and update.
Some of the potential disadvantages of using a Webservice database option are:-
- Possibility of increased latency in responding to IP/Country database calls.
- Possibility of timeouts when calling the IP/Country database.
These potential disadvantages are due to possible but unpredictable outages and latencies between our webservice (hosting the IP/Country database lookup) and your webserver. Whilst maintain excellent uptime and performance on our webservice, the unpredictable nature of The Internet could result in degraded performance or occasional loss of realtime IP/Country lookup.
Rolosoft Geo IP.NET is able to cope with both potential concerns as follows:-
Our IP/Country web service has been constructed primarily with performance in mind. Webservice calls / responses use server side caching and HTTP compression to provide speedy results to queries.
Rolosoft Geo IP.NET uses extensive caching to reduce to a minimum the number of web service calls made. Firstly, locale information is stored in a secure, encrypted and tamperproof cookie stored in a cookie. The cookie is set with a long duration (default one week) and is sent with a users first hit on a Rolosoft Geo IP.NET enabled website. Subsequent queries on IP/Country are serviced from this cookie and the webservice is not needed.
In addition to secure cookie storage of a users locale, a local cache of recent web service IP/Country lookups is stored in memory locally on your webserver. Subsequent calls to lookup IP/Country are serviced from the cache rather than referring back to the web service.
By using this extensive and unobtrusive caching, Rolosoft Geo IP.NET can still run quickly whilst benefiting from the ease of use that comes with using the Webservice database option.
In the unlikely event that our IP/Country Webservice database cannot be contacted, Rolosoft Geo IP.NET will behave as follows:-
- Use secure cookie where available.
- If no cookie is available, use the memory cache.
- If no cookie and the IP/Country lookup does not exist in cache, the defaultculturecode is used instead.
In the absence of connection (for whatever reason) to the Webservice IP/Country database, Rolosoft Geo IP.NET will intelligently keep running until connection to the Webservice database is restored.