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I am currently in the process of investigating the various different caching mechanisms out there whether they be free or at some cost (minimal preferably).

The situation. Currently we have to load-balanced servers that host our web application with a third server being an SQL server. This site is a eShop, and it gets hit quite regularly at large volumes.

I have been asked to research the caching mechanisms of Memcached and Unity from MS, but in the process have come across AppFabric as well.

Can any one please tell me what for the above scenario is the best caching mechanism?

We are currently using the .net caching mechanism with ASP.Net and we are also aware of the Enterprise Library Caching system.

Thanks.

pnuts
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  • We need more information about what your caching, the kind of eviction strategy you need, etc. Not all caching is equal, and the solution you need will depend on the need. AppFabric is a rich, distributed cache, but that may well be way overkill for your particular need. – jrista Jun 29 '10 at 03:23
  • We are basically caching the entire DB. Its about 0.5Gb. When ever we change the data we are currently forcing a cache refresh which is currently once a week. –  Jun 29 '10 at 03:37

1 Answers1

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If you're just wanting to cache your database, you can just use the built in .NET cache provider, and use the SQL Cache dependency. This way, if any data in your database, it will evict your cache on both servers.

The drawback with a distributed caching mechanism is that there's still a lot of network traffic that occurs to query for the cached objects across the cache servers.

Makotosan
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