Looking for a file-based cache on .NET / Key-Value Store with expiration

Question

I'm looking for some convenient way to cache data on disk. Basically a key-value store with expiration and the value being (xml)serialized .

Something that could be used like...

var userCacheId = "3332";
var userData = cache.Retrieve(
    userCacheId,
    () => readUserDataFromDatabase(userCacheId), // Load delegate if not in cache
    TimeSpan.FromMinutes(30)); // expiration time

It should be - Used on a Windows Application - Automatically clean up expired cache entries / free the used disk space - Be thread safe - Allow to remove cache entries by key

Any suggestions on this? Maybe some hip NoSql Database would do exactly that? :)

Answer 1

How about System.Runtime.Caching?

Answer 2

Most caches are memory caches (as caching a database result to disk really wouldn't buy a whole lot as far as retrieval goes unless your database is a serious bottleneck). If you want the cache to be local, System.Runtime.Caching should take care of your needs. If you want the cache to be highly-available and updatable across nodes, I suggest looking into NCache or memcached.

Answer 3

Found this: http://www.eggheadcafe.com/tutorials/aspnet/56161e9e-7fa3-48e8-9dfe-9f7a28f4d58e/filebased-cache-for-web.aspx File-Based Cache for Web and non-Web Apps plus Extend ASP.NET 4.0 OutputCacheProvider By Peter Bromberg

from http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3396328/disk-based-cache-using-providerbase