MemCached vs Redis for ASP.NET and Entity framework?

Question

We have narrowed our choices for caching down to memcached and redis in our application. We already have considered and will apply Output Caching in our application. My question is what is your experience with both and which one should I prefer?

We are expecting about 400000 users later on hence we are thinking of caching and we are in process of optimizing our application by profiling and fixing queries. We also considered Ncache but because of price its out of contention. At the same time we think that memcached and redis will perform equally for free.

But what would be a better option for caching keeping in mind we are using asp.net mvc 2, sql server 2005 and entity framework 4? Are there issues that I should be aware of with any of them ?

Any suggestions or ideas are welcome! Thanks a lot.

Answer 1

memcached and redis differ quite a bit.

Memcached is completely in memory and will lose all of its cache in case the server is restarted.

Redis is persistent, and on top of that has a lot more features (like set operations, lists, counters, etc).

Since you're only talking about a cache, memcache might be the better fit since it's dedicated for just that.

We use memcache for a lot of things and what it does it does good. If it turns out later that you need persistence, you can always switch for memcachedb which uses the same mecache protocol but has a berkelydb backend