Memcached with Windows and .NET

Question

Is there anyone already implement memcached for production use in Windows environment? Because many blogs that I've read, it's not recommended to run memcached in Windows especially for production use, for example running memcached on windows.

And one more thing, which memcached client that is good to use with c# and .net 3.5 ? I've found many alternate such as Memcached Providers @ Codeplex, Beitmemcached, and memcached provider @ Sourceforge

Answer 1

Why do you need to run memcached on windows? It’s an expensive affair in a production environment.

If your code needs to run in a Windows environment get a windows memcached client and talk to a *nix based memcached machine.

In a production environment running memcached on Server 2003 or 2008 would mean that you get licenses for all those boxes. Linux will offer you all the OSS benefits. TCO will rise linearly with memcached on Windows

Edit:

It’s been around 1.5 years since I wrote this answer and lot of things have changed since. You’ve to take notice, especially when someone like Dustin comments.
So here’s how you can get memcached on windows running. Download memcached for windows from Couchbase (formerly Northscale).
Typically if you plan to run memcached on the same production machine you’d want to start it in limited memory, i.e. define the maximum memory memcached is allowed to use.

c:\Program Files\memcached>memcached.exe -m 128.

Here memcached runs with a maximum of 128 mb usage. You don’t want memcached to take up all the memory on your webserver.

The moment you decided to scale out memcached you’ll need to consider what I said earlier. Additionally compress your values in the key value combinations. Web servers typically consume very little CPU (2-3%) usage and compression brings in a lot of value to network throughout in comparison to the CPU usage. If you are too concerned about normal compression, try LZO

Answer 2

I'm suprised no one here has yet to mention Redis - it is one of the most feature-rich and fastest (110,000 SET's per second on an entry level linux box) key-value data stores with rich data-structure support for strings, sets, lists, sorted sets and hashes.

Although windows is not an officially supported platform, it runs perfectly under windows with all tests passing. I have windows builds (using Cygwin) available here: https://github.com/ServiceStack/ServiceStack.Redis#redis-server-builds-for-windows

It also has client bindings for nearly every programming language in use today. I maintain a rich Open Source C# Redis client with native API support for any C# POCO type, transaction support and Thread-safe client managers that are ready to be dropped into any IOC at: https://github.com/ServiceStack/ServiceStack.Redis