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Welcome to Community Preview of NCache Express

NCache Express April 2008 CTP

NCache Express is a distributed object cache for .NET. It also provides a highly scalable Distributed ASP.NET Session State for applications running in server farms. This enables you to significantly speed up and scale up your .NET application.

As you know, Caching Application Block (CAB) is an InProc stand-alone cache. It does not support OutProc or Distributed Caching. NCache now provides these capabilities for CAB. If you’re developing ASP.NET applications with multiple worker processes, with NCache, you no longer have multiple InProc copies of the cache in each of your worker processes. Additionally, if your application is deployed on a multi-server configuration, your cache can now be distributed to these multiple servers and stay synchronized.

In Enterprise Library 4.0, Caching Application Block (CAB) now allows NCache to be plugged in without any code change. You only need to modify your app.config to incorporate NCache into your application.

This is a Community Preview Release (CTP) that will expire on May 31, 2008 and is only intended to solicit feedback from users. We’re going to be releasing a final version of NCache Express when Enterprise Library 4.0 is released and this version will not expire and will be totally FREE to use.

NCache Express is a FREE version of NCache intended for small server farms (2 servers max). The idea is to let you start FREE on small configuration and then as your needs grow, you can migrate to our commercial version (NCache Enterprise Edition) seamlessly.

Limitations of NCache Express

1. Only for 2 server farms (2-node cache clusters with local clients only)

2. Replicated Cache only (no Partitioned or Client Cache)

3. Max Cache Size: 500MB

4. Max ASP.NET Sessions in cache: 1000

5. 32-bit only (no 64-bit version)

How to Use NCache Express with Microsoft CAB Applications

1. Install & Configure NCache Express on each server.
   If your server has multiple network cards, make sure you configure NCache for it.

2. Define a distributed cache:
   Defining a local or distributed Cache is very simple. NCache Express automatically configures a default distributed (myReplicatedCache) and local (myCache) cache upon installing NCache. You only need to copy paste the configuration and rename cache-id, server-name and port number for using a distributed or local cache. This configuration file “config.ncconf” would be available at “C:\Program Files\NCacheExpress\config” installation folder.
   
   Here is the configuration for a replicated cache:

      <configuration>
       <cache-config name="myreplicatedcache" inproc="false"/>
       <log trace-errors="true" trace-notices="true" enabled="true"/>
       <cleanup interval="30sec" />
       <perf-counters enabled="true"/>
       <eviction-policy op-timeout="60sec" stats-repl-interval="300sec" topology="replicated"/>
       <cluster trace-errors="true" trace-notices="true" enabled="true"/>
        <channel tcp-port="8700" initial-hosts="cacheServer1[8700],cacheServer2[8700]" num-initial-hosts="2"/>
       </cluster>
       <storage cache-size="500mb"/>
       </cache-config>
      </configuration>

   1. Tcp-port: Each cache uses a unique port and this port needs to be the same on both cache servers that are forming this replicated cluster.

   2. Initial-hosts: If you are creating a 2-node replicated cache, mention both host names along with the tcp-port that both are using.

   3. Num-initial-hosts: This should reflect the number of nodes in the cluster. For a 2-node replicated cache, this should be “2”.

   The easiest way to create a 2-node replicated cache is by copying the same cache definition (as shown above) to all the “C:\Program Files\NCacheExpress\config\config.ncconf” on both cache servers.

3. Modify web.config or app.config file:
   to specify that you want to use NCache Express instead of CAB’s regular built-in CacheManager.