Distributed Caching

Distributed Caching

What is a Cache? Asp.Net Cache Limitations of Asp.Net Cache. What is Distributed Caching? Advantages of Distributed Caching What is AppFabric Caching? AppFabric Caching Architecture AppFabric Caching Cluster Configuration AppFabric – Pre Requisites AppFabric Cache – Installation Modes

Advantages of Distributed Caching

In general Caching improves performance of an application by storing frequently used information in the cache memory which is easily accessible when compared to the standard memory. Simple caching techniques can be used for smaller applications which get executed in a single server, however when it comes to larger applications which cannot run in a single server the simple caching techniques are not sufficient enough.

Larger applications required multiple servers, running in parallel to handle the huge volume of requests, hence we need Distributed Caching for large applications. The following are the advantages of using Distributed Caching.

Distributed Cache

Data is an important part of any application, in a conventions web application architecture which does not use any cache, data can be stored in 2 ways, using the database or using sessions, but both these options have their own limitations.

The database can store any amount of data, but fetching large amount of data from the database and displaying in the UI will bring performance of the application. Sessions are quick but there is a limitation on the amount of data that can be stored in session, adding more data to the session, consumes more memory and hence brings down the application performance.

SharePoint 2013 Distributed Cache Service

SharePoint 2013 provides a distributed cache service which stores the user’s login tokens in a centralized cache, and can be used by any of the front end web servers in a load balancing environment.

In SharePoint 2010, the login token is stored in the specific front end servers, in a load balancing setup if the user happens to hit a different front end server for subsequent requests then the user needs to be re-authenticated since the token for the previous request is stored in a different front end server, this caused delays and a need for re-authentication whenever the uses request hits a different front end server, behind the load balancer.


The Server running the Distributed Cache service is known as a cache host, we can have multiple servers running the Distributed Cache, these individual servers form a cache cluster, the cache cluster acts as a single unit, the total cache size is the sum of the memory allocated to the Distributed Cache service on each of the cache hosts.

The Distributed Cache service also helps in enabling micro blogs and feeds across all users. The Distributed Cache service caches the blog messages and comments and enables faster sharing of information among the users.


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