Does anybody have any thoughts on how Caching might improve performance of .NET applications? I know that Microsoft has a Cache object but from what I can see it does not work in a server-farm environment. I have seen at least one product (NCache by
http://www.alachisoft.com) that claims to be an object cache for server-farms.
Has anybody used NCache or any other products for object caching in .NET?
Comments
Caching is great, if you want to minimize hits to a database for instance. However, it works best if you cache data that does not change often, like a readonly list.
Personally, caching is something I would implement near the end of a projects completion as an optimization step. The reason is because, it is hard to debug pages that are cached, because you have to write some code to dump the cache.
Keeping Cache uptodate is more challenging in server-farms. I have also searched and evaluated lots of products that provide disributed caching facility for server-farms. But at the end I found NCache(from www.alachisoft.com) to be more useful and productive than the others. The best thing about the product is that you can use it in your caching application without changing your existing code. I am satisfied with the results of this product.