Alternate and fast option for AppFabricCache?

Question

I am looking for a better n optimal solution who can replace AppFabricCache and improve the performance of my ASP.Net-MVC application.

Answer 1

According to Microsoft, Azure Cache (the name of their Redis offering) should be used for all development on Azure instead of AppFabric Cache. I think that's a rather good endorsement for Redis and the only alternative if you want to deploy your application to Azure.

That said, a distributed cache will only help with performance in specific scenarios: when you deploy your application to a multi-machine farm and you need consistency of the cached data. It will actually hurt performance if you have only one machine or if you want to cache read-only lookup data. The network call will always be slower than a memory lookup.

You should also consider, why do you want to replace AppFabric Cache? What doesn't work for you? You may encounter the same problems if you change to another solution.

For example, synchronization problems will always appear if you host AppFabric or Memcached on the web servers themselves. Both the web server and the cache use a lot of CPU (and RAM) during high traffic. This will lead to problems, with delayed requests, timeouts or ... sync problems. Redis avoids these because there is no local caching at all - only a remote in-memory cache cluster.

There are a ton of resources on how to use Redis in .NET. A lot of them refer to Azure Cache but you can use the same code and simply change the connection strings if you want to host Redis yourself.

For example, in Session state with Azure Redis cache the only change required is to change the server's DNS name in the configuration file. The article How to Use Azure Redis Cache uses a third-party Redis client to connect to Azure Redis Cache. Again, you only need to change the host name to connect to an on-premise Redis server.