WCF Caching Solution - Need Advice

Question

The company I work for is looking to implement a caching solution. We have several WCF Web Services hosted and we need to cache certain values that can be persisted and fetched regardless of a client's session to a service. I am looking at the following technologies:

• Caching Application Block 4.1

• WCF TCP Service using HttpRuntime Caching

• Memcached Win32 and Client

• Microsoft AppFabric Caching Beta 2

Our test server is a Windows Server 2003 with IIS6, but our production server is Windows Server 2008, so any of the above options would work (except for AppFabric Caching on our test server).

Does anyone have any experience with any of these? This caching solution will not be used to store a lot of data, but it will need to be fetched from frequently and fast.

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

We are using the built-in HttpRuntime Caching in our application, and it works very well.

It is very easy to put in place, as there is nothing to install on your servers. Moreover, moving to AppFabric Caching should not be such a big deal later on.

That said, it also comes with some limitations especially if your services are not hosted inside the same IIS application as the cached objects will be duplicated for each of them. If you don't plan to cache much data and/or if you don't plan to cache them for a long time, you should be fine as you won't end up consuming too much RAM.

You don't appear to have load-balanced servers, but in such a scenario, using the HttpRuntime caching also means duplicating the cache on each server. This is the kind of things that you can prevent with memcached or the AppFabric Caching...