Beginning ASP.NET 3.5 in C# 2008: From Novice to Professional, Second Edition

24.1. Understanding Caching

ASP.NET has taken some dramatic steps forward with caching. Many developers who first learn about caching see it as a bit of a frill, but nothing could be further from the truth. Used intelligently, caching can provide a twofold, threefold, or even tenfold performance improvement by retaining important data for just a short period of time.

Caching is often used to store information that's retrieved from a database. This makes sense—after all, retrieving information from a database takes time. With careful optimization, you can reduce the time and lessen the burden imposed on the database to a certain extent, but you can never eliminate it. But with a system that uses caching, some data requests won't require a database ...