Output Caching to Disk in Whidbey
Oddur Magnusson asked an interesting question about caching out of process with ASP.NET.
With ASP.NET V1 and V1.1, cached items are always stored in-memory. With ASP.NET Whidbey -- starting in the spring Beta -- we'll automatically save output cached entries to disk. This will enable cache items to survive worker process restarts. It also enables you to cache items for far longer durations without requiring tons of memory. Applications using aggresive output caching today should see a significant reduction in memory working set as a result.
The disk based output caching support also works well with an additional new Whidbey feature -- which is database driven cache invalidations. You could use the two to cache a page for weeks -- but automatically re-generate it if necessary when the database rows it uses are updated on the backend. Just like a cached page in memory, you can setup the cache item to automatically vary by querystring or other browser values.