Help required, ASP .NET Cache

PeterMoris · Joined: 19 Apr 2006 Posts: 1

I’m currently working on a distributed application that requires cluster wide caching support for its operation. Since ASP.NET Cache does not work in clustered environment, I was thinking to code my own custom caching solution and confronted some issues in providing cache synchronization. Please advise how to add/change a Cache item that is added/changed in one of the Appdomains. Also, how to remove/expire a Cache item that has been removed/expired in one of the AppDomains.

ScottHilton · Joined: 21 Apr 2006 Posts: 2

I would suggest you to use an already available commercial solution for clustered cache just like NCache from www.alachisoft.com. It is my personal experience that building a custom cache solution for clustered environment is not feasible. This is because developing a clustered caching solution requires a lot of effort and expertise. Handling concurrency and synchronization requires thorough and extensive testing and still your application can crash with a small bug that you may overlook at first. This ends up in delayed schedule and obviously an unhappy client.

JohnSeana · Joined: 24 Apr 2006 Posts: 1

The Microsoft .NET Framework version 2.0 includes significant enhancements to ASP.NET in virtually all areas including Caching. Features such as configurable caching and SQL cache invalidation allow you to optimize the performance of your applications greatly.
With the introduction of database-triggered cache invalidation, now you can remove or invalidate an item from the cache when data in a SQL Server database changes. The database-triggered cache invalidation capability allows you to ensure that items in the cache are kept up to date with the changes in the database. ASP.NET 2.0 also provides you more control over the cached data by enabling you to set caching attributes at the SqlDataSource control level.
Now you can create custom cache dependencies by inheriting from the CacheDependency class which is no more a sealed class in ASP.NET 2.0. This make it easy to create your own custom cache dependencies required for a particular scenario. Also now you can be notified when an item is removed from the application cache. This way you can perform the required operation immediately.

ScottHilton · Joined: 21 Apr 2006 Posts: 2

rose · Joined: 21 Feb 2006 Posts: 29

So 2.0 has cache problems that 1.1 doesnt have?
Hmm, thats strange. You'd think they would improve it, not make it worse.