Chapter 12. Using Azure AppFabric Caching to Improve Performance

Caching is an essential part of the tool that enables applications to scale in order to handle a large number of concurrent requests. This chapter will explore what data caching is and how it can improve the performance of your application. A sample application will be created that adds an AppFabric cache to RIA Services.

The topics covered will be as follows:

• Data caching

• Azure AppFabric caching

• Caching raw data in AppFabric

• ASP.NET session caching

Data caching

Data caching is used to improve the performance of applications. The performance gains are achieved by creating a copy of the master data and storing it in a location that the consumer can access faster than the original data (for example, holding it in the memory rather than fetching it from a database). Caching is typically done on the data that is accessed frequently (such as lookup tables) or is expensive to obtain (long request times, data calculations, and so on.)

Using...