Suggestions for simple .NET distributed caching solution

Simple, fast, lightweight and safe sound like things like redis and memcached, which can be very effective as a central cache. For stackoverflow we use redis via BookSleeve (client) but most stores will work similarly. There is also an AppFabric cache, but that is considerably more complex.

Key points though:

• your data will need to be serializable in some way
• if you are currently using cache of large objects (like a big DataTable) you'll need to consider bandwidth implications, or make it more granular
• you'd probably benefit from a 2-tier cache (one local memory, with the central store as secondary)
• which means you'd also need to consider invalidation (we do that via the pub/sub API in redis)

memcached along with an ASP.NET provider is a popular choice. Bear in mind though that in .NET 4.0 the recommended way to do caching is to use the new ObjectCache instead of HttpRuntime.Cache. There is a built in memory implementation into the .NET framework (MemoryCache) and also you may checkout an implementation for memcached.

Give Dache a try. It is an open source .NET distributed caching solution that is extremely performant. http://www.getdache.net