Distributed caching: Velocity

This post by Scott has me thinking a bit about caching. It's a topic that I'm sure every ASP.NET developer has had to deal with, but it's funny how you can be around something so much over time that you cease to think critically about it. That's certainly my condition.

I admittedly don't find any time to mess around with other platforms (which in part comes from a desire to be great at using one, not mediocre at many), but I do read a number of blogs and try to keep up with news sources to at least understand what's going on. It's pretty clear the for a lot of heavily trafficked apps in PHP, Ruby or whatever, that memcached is like the gold standard and saviour of performance when used correctly. That certainly makes sense to me, though the stuff I've typically worked with is far smaller, and managing cached data on the Web server itself is adequate.

So it's interesting to see Microsoft releasing "Velocity" to do largely the same thing that memcached does. It certainly helps round out the Microsoft platform (even if it is a little "me too"), which I'm very pleased to see growing beyond the Web server-database-Web framework combination. The strength here, to me is that you can pretty easily cache any serializable object. I emphasize the word easy. Looking through the documentation, I think they've got a pretty solid API. It should be easy enough to rewrite your data access code to use this.

Someone deserves a pat on the back for this.