Clear MemoryCache across worker processes

Question

I have an ASP.NET MVC application that runs on IIS 7. It is setup as a web garden and the number of worker processes matches the number of my processors. I tend to experience some heavy load at times and this setup as worked best.

I have implemented some caching using System.Web.Cache. I will occasionally need to invalidate some of items in my cache however I cannot clear the cache across all processes.

Does the .NET 4 System.Runtime.Caching features make this any easier? Here is a similar question but I hoping there is better advice with .NET 4. Flush HttpRuntime.Cache objects across all worker processes on IIS webserver

Answer 1

System.Web.Cache and System.Runtime.Caching provide almost the same features, it is just a simple memory cache where items in the cache can have an expiration time, dependencies etc...

If you want to run your site on multiple physical machines or in your case you run it as web garden, caching data in any in process cache doesn't make a lot of sense because it would cache it for each process again. This will let the memory consumption grow pretty quickly I guess...

In those scenarios a distributed cache system is the best choice, because all processes can leverage the already cached data...

I worked with 2 pretty popular distributed in memory cache systems, one is memcached which was also mentioned in the your link.

The other one is the app fabric cache, here is a good example of how to use it

Memchached is a "simple" cache, it doesn't care about security and all this stuff in the first place. But it is very easy to implement and there are good .Net clients which are really simple to use, almost exactly as the .Net build in crap.

If you want to encrypt the data transfers of your cache and have all this high secured, you might want to go with app fabric...