Object cache for C#

Question

I\'m doing a document viewer for some document format. To make it easier, let\'s say this is a PDF viewer, a Desktop application. One requirement for the s

Answer 1

A classic trade-off situation. Keeping everything in memory will be fast at the cost of massively increased memory consumption, whilst retrieving from disc decreases memory consumption, but isn't as performant. However, you already know all this!

The built-in System.Web.Caching.Cache class is great, and I've used it to good effect many times myself in my ASP.NET applications (although mostly for database record caching), however, the drawback is that the cache will only run on one machine (typically a sole web server) and cannot be distributed across multiple machines.

If it's possible to "throw some hardware" at the problem, and it doesn't necessarily need to be expensive hardware, just boxes with plenty of memory, you could always go with a distributed caching solution. This will give you much more memory to play with whilst retaining (nearly) the same level of performance.

Some options for a distributed caching solution for .NET are:

Memcached.NET

indeXus.Net

or even Microsoft's own Velocity project.