Avoiding Unnecessary Construction of SPWeb and SPSite Objects

An SPWeb or SPSite object can occupy a lot of memory. Avoid constructing objects of these types simply to get a reference to a parent object. Instead, to get a reference to a web application, use the static SPWebApplication.Lookup(Uri) method, and pass it a Uri object that is created with the URI of the web application. You can then get a reference to the farm by using the Farm property of the web application object. (You can get a reference to a remote farm by using the static Open(String) method.) The ContentDatabases property of the web application object contains a collection of the content databases in the web application. You can get a reference to a particular content database through this property if you know its index in the collection. For more information, see the reference topic for the SPContentDatabaseCollection class. The following code illustrates some of these points.

SPWebApplication webApplication = SPWebApplication.Lookup(new Uri("http://localhost/");
SPFarm farm = webApplication.Farm;
SPContentDatabase content = webApplication.ContentDatabases[0];