Im building a image gallery which reads file from disk, create thumbnails on the fly and present them to the user. This works good, except the processing takes a bit time.
I then decided to cache the processed images using the ASP .NET Application Cache. When a image is processed I add the byte[] stream to the cache. As far as I know this is beeing saved into the system memory. And this is working perfect, the loading of the page is much faster.
My question is if there are thousands of images which gets cached in the Application Cache, will that affect the server performance in any way?
Are there other, better ways to do this image caching?
By default Application Cache stores data on server memory; depending on your website navigation pattern, maybe you don’t get too many cache hits.
You could to preprocess all images to generate its thumbnails at once and store it with your original image. This way you don’t need to deal with that cache layer and, probably, won’t take too much more disk space.