Jag,
Here's what I did in ASP/IIS to eliminate this issue.
We did this for Lookup Tables in Oracle to cut down on query time (referencing lookup tables in Oracle queries causes your query time to expand greatly if you don't have the right architect designing your system).
What we would do is on the Application_OnStart event (which is when the App Server loaded), we'd load the lookup tables into global session variables as arrays, and then if they were changed, reload them. If you're looking to sync this across multiple app servers, you may want to look into having periodic updates
.
What we did after this was instead of referencing the database every time we had queries for the lookup tables, we'd reference the global session variables instead using functions. In other words, that extra 64K of RAM bought us a performance increase by a factor of at least 10, as we only had to hit RAM with compiled code to get the values to build the lookup table, as opposed to the overhead caused by hitting the DB.
Most app servers provide the ability to store global session variables, no?
I hope this helps,
Mitch