Caching Solutions

Question

Has anyone done a thorough comparison of AppFabric and NCache or AppFabric and ScaleOut? We are currently looking to implement either AppFabric, NCache or ScaleOut for distr

Answer 1

As a more mature product, NCache has a number of more advanced caching features that Velocity/AppFabric doesn't have -- check out their website for some "marketing" comparisons.

However, we have had a number of issues troubleshooting NCache and obtaining more visibility from their support/engineering team into certain behaviors of their application. Given that, plus the cost compared to AppFabric, I'm not sure I would recommend NCache at this point -- at least, we're in the process of re-evaluating our caching provider.

My frustration/complaint with Velocity/AppFabric is the the sluggishness in the release schedule. Seems like they were in CTP forever. Certainly Microsoft can crush NCache on price alone. There are now players like NorthScale (memcached) that are entering the fray which I think are also worth considering. A lot depends on what you want to use caching for in your application.

Answer 2

Some might argue that this is a biased comparison, but it's worth reviewing..

http://www.alachisoft.com/comparison/ncache-vs-appfabric.html

PDF has the full review.

http://www.alachisoft.com/downloads/comparison/ncache-vs-appfabric.pdf

Answer 3

It is looking like we will need more advanced functionality than what Velocity provides so it will be either NCache or ScaleOut. There are good reasons for both, we just need to sort through these. We do not have Unix resources so memcached is out. I know there is a Windows port but colleagues who know memcached tell me that it is somewhat buggy and if you are going to bother going down the memcached path, you really should make the effort to go for the Unix version.

Answer 4

Here is a good comparison between the features of NCache and Appfabric

Answer 5

The most used one is Memcached. for sure. we currently are starting using AppFabric as our dcache, as it easily integrates into our .net solutions, and has a good feature set, that we want to use.

if you just do basic dcaching, make a abstraction of caching itself (or use the .net 4 System.Runtime.Caching.ObjectCache) so you are safe if you want to do changes. or want to stress test more solutions.

Also, depending on your App architecture, think of using more entities/instances of your DCache, as different parts maybe favor different systems.