appfabric cache retrieval is slow

Question

I use appfabric cache for my application. My application reads the value from database at first time and than put object(datatable) in cache.

I used memory cache before the appfabric cache. When I test the performance for Appfabric vs MemoryCache the results are unexpected for appfabric.

Memory cache took 44 seconds to read 10,000 records from cache Appfabric cache took 15 minutes to read 10,000 records.

I created cluster on machine which having coreI5 processor, 6 GB ram.

Why it taking more time?

Note - My local cache is disable. Cachefactory is created once only. It not created every calls.

Answer 1

MemoryCache is an in-process cache, so adding or fetching an item from cache is almost similar to getting from an Hashtable(nearly zero time), since no communication or serialization/deserialization is involved.

However Appfabric is an out of process cache, so each operation will involve serialization/deserialization of data along with the communication cost to add/get data from the server.This is why you are facing this much difference in performance.

To compare performance of appfabric, compare it with other out of process distributed caching solutions like NCache. NCache is also a fast and scalable distributed caching solution for .Net. NCache has a rich set of caching features as compared to appfabric. You can download its enterprise edition for free evaluation. Visit http://www.alachisoft.com/ncache/ for more details.