Microsoft® .NET Distributed Applications: Integrating XML Web Services and .NET Remoting

Caching

Retrieving information from a database takes time. With careful optimization, you can reduce the time and lessen the burden imposed on the server to a certain extent, but you can never eliminate it. Caching is an elegant solution to this problem. With a system that uses caching, some data requests won’t require a database connection and a query. Instead, they’ll retrieve the information directly from server memory—a much faster proposition.

Of course, storing information in memory isn’t always a good idea. Server memory is a limited resource; if you try to store too much, some of that information will be paged to disk, potentially slowing down the entire system. That’s why the best caching strategies are self-limiting. When you store information ...