Recently, I evaluated SharedCache, which according to their website is a high performance distributed and replication cache system built for .Net applications running in server farms. The system is made available to .Net applications through a Windows service.

 Some of the key features are listed of SharedCache are listed below:

• Works for both web and non-web solutions.
• Is extremely fast for fetch.
• It supports multiple topologies: distributed partitioned caching, replicated caching, and single instance caching. You can choose which you need based on your requirements (for example, you may want to choose replicated caching over single caching to ensure that you don’t have any single points of failure)
• In case of Caching, one of the most important aspect is purging. With SharedCache, you have a choice to make amongst the several that are supported:
  • Cache Item Priority
  • Least Recent Used Item (LRU)
  • Least Frequently Used Item (LFU)
  • Time based
  • Biggest Latency First (BLF)
  • Lowest Latency First (LLF)
  • Hybrid – Creating an index based on various item attributes such as: time in cache, Amount of requests, Size, Cache Life Time, etc.
• Configurable maximum cache size and the load factor when the system starts to purge cached items.

You can install the service by downloading it from CodePlex. And several samples and discussions are available at the author’s blog. The best thing about this service is that there is plenty of documentation to guide you.

Just try it out. Its pretty cool.