In-memory caching can provide orders-of-magnitude performance and scalability benefits to dynamic web applications. ASP.NET has various built-in caching schemes. But its caching is limited to whatever spare RAM exists on a single web server. This makes it challenging to build internet-scale applications using ASP.NET.
Large web sites such as LiveJournal, Facebook, Flickr and Wikipedia use a distributed caching tool called memcached, which makes it easy to cache data on any machine in a data center that has spare RAM. Recently, Microsoft released a tool code-named Velocity that attempts to do the same thing. This talk will demonstrate how memcached and Velocity work, how they differ, and how you can integrate distributed caching into your ASP.NET web applications today.
This talk debuted at VSLive Las Vegas in October 2008 and was given at VSLive San Francisco in February 2009.
Karl Seguin wrote an excellent post on using memcached in .NET.
Note: This talk can be presented at your conference or private corporate group in 1-hour, half-day, or full-day formats. We can also give a version of this session in the PHP programming language. Contact us for details.
Hi Jeff,
I was at your talk at VSLive in San Francisco. I really appreciated the demo and knowledge that you provided. I had inquired about the demo project (VS project) that you used during the demonstration on memcache. You had mentioned to look on your site for it. Any hints to where I might find this? The project you used/created seemed to be very helpful and would love to be able to see it again to get a head start on this technology.
Thanks!
Tom
Sorry for the delay on this, will try to get something on the site by this weekend.
As stated above, ASP.NET cache has drawbacks. These also include Data integrity problems in Web Farm/Garden, Cache size limit, single point of failure and more.
Obviously you will not afford your cache to become the source of data loss in case of its failure. Data integrity is also a big issue.
The alternatives to ASP.NET does not have these problems. If you use third party distributed cache, there are many like NCache Express, it lets you cache ASP.NET without needing a code change. It is easy to use, download to try from http://www.alachisoft.com/download.html
Developers involved in writing large applications and want to cache thier data can look for NCache, the paid version of distributed cache. It is feature-rich and gives you all the flexibility of caching
No idea why you’d pay $2,495/CPU for your product when you can use memcached for free, but I guess it must have some benefit above and beyond memcached’s. Memcached has the benefit of having been used on some of the biggest sites in the world and it has a significant developer following that is advancing its feature set in an open-source manner. So I think I’ll stick with that, thanks.
Also, if you are relying on cache in such a way that losing a cache node loses data, you are not using cache correctly. I don’t know why you’d even bring this up since it’s pretty basic — seems like you’re trying to sell your expensive product using some kind of FUD strategy.