View state is used by the ASP.NET page framework to automatically save the page and its control values prior to rendering the page, and state management is accomplished using view state.

When an ASP.NET page is processed the current state of the page and its controls is converted into a string and saved in the page as a hidden field. When the page is posted back to the server, such as through a postback event when a server-side control is clicked, the page parses the view state string at page initialization and restores property information in the page.

For more information see the "Introduction to Web Forms State Management" topic in your Visual Studio documentation.

Advantages of State Management

The greatest benefit of state management is in situations where a user accesses a chart with a large amount of relatively static data that takes a long time to retrieve. For example, if a chart is generated after a data query from a remote database or socket server, then the chart's performance is affected by factors external to your chart server, such as network delays, busy data server, and so on.

By using state management, the chart data and/or appearance settings are persisted and reused for subsequent charts. This reduces the requests to the database or socket server and improves the performance of your page.

Considerations

When using state management, you should consider the increase in the amount of data sent from the server to the client. Using state management on appearance settings causes a relatively small increase in network traffic, while using state management on 1,000 data points causes a large increate in network traffic.