For the last several years I've participated on an internal Microsoft task force with the single goal of getting a consistent caching strategy across various groups. We've made a tremendous amount of progress, much of which will show up in the next version of the .NET Framework (version 2.0).
Tomorrow we're reviewing our progress with Bill Gates in what's known (and feared/dreaded by some) as a 'BillG Review'. A BillG review usually consists of 2 hours with the top executives from various teams, e.g. Developer tools, Windows, and/or SQL Server where you get to present work that they are interested in. Usually this is either new projects or projects that affect many other teams across the company, such as caching.
It's not my first meeting that I've had with BillG --- everyone goes by their alias in MSFT :) --- but it will be the first time he'll be critiquing much of my work (caching in ASP.NET) directly. Frankly, I'm kind of looking forwad to it. We've done a tremendous amount of work in ASP.NET to enable some fantastic caching scenarios and with the new stuff -- to be disclosed at a date in the not so distant future -- we're really going to once again change the way devleopers think about caching in their applications.
Should be fun ... we'll see if I still think that after the meeting! ...hopefully I'll remember and add a blog entry too!
As a side note, we upgraded the www.asp.net site to new hardware last week. We went from:
2 dual-processor 750MHZ 500MB RAM Windows 2000 web servers
1 single-processor 750MHZ 1GB RAM Windows 2000 database server
to
2 dual-processor 2.2 GHZ 1GB RAM Windows 2003 web servers
1 dual-processor 2.8GHZ 2GB RAM Windows 2000 database server
Our CPU utilization on our database server went from about 60-85% utilization to about 2-5% utilization -- one of the other big changes we made with the database server was moving the logs and data to a separate raid controllers.