What are the strongest features of Memcached?

Question

In particular what strengths does it have over caching features of Asp.net

Answer 1

memcached is a distributed cache -- the whole cache can be spread into multiple boxes. so for example you can use memcached to store session data in cluster environment, so this data is available to any box of the cluster.

memcached can be compared to Microsoft's Velocity (http://blogs.msdn.com/velocity/).

Answer 2

Another nice feature is that memcached runs as a stand alone service. If you take your application down, the cached data will remain in memory as long as the service runs.

Answer 3

We use memcached as a caching back-end in a ASP.NET web site. We have 12 memcached boxes.

UP for memcached:

• Much more scalable, just add boxes with memory to spare
• The cache nodes are very ignorant: this means that they have no knowlegde about the other nodes participating. This makes the management and configuration of such a system extremely easy.
• All of the webservers have the same values in cache (so you never see hopping values deending on which webserver serves your request)

DOWN for memcached:

• compared to in-memory cache, it is very slow. Mostly because of serialization/deserialization and network latency
• The cache nodes are very ignorant: ther is, for example, no way to iterate over all of the cached items

Memcached is the simplest en fastest tool is you need distributed caching. If you can use in-process in-memory cache for your application, that will always be faster. We use a cache manager that will offload certain items to memcached and keep others in local cache.