ASP.NET Site Performance Secrets

Output caching

Output caching lets you cache entire pages or sections of pages on the server itself. It gives you the following advantages:

• Flexibility: Supports caching different versions of files, by query string variable, request header, or a custom variable.
• Allows caching of parts of a page.
• Life span of cached items is relatively predictable—no competition for cache space by other websites. This may not apply if you use shared hosting, where many websites use the same web server.

It comes with the following disadvantages as well:

• Not really suitable for caching visitor-specific pages because this would mean storing many pages with low hit rates.
• Uses server memory.
• No caching across servers because the cache is all in server memory. In a web ...