Just a bit of background first. I currently have a site hosted with Windows Azure, with multiple instances and also AppFabric as my sole caching provider.
Everything was going great until my traffic spiked earlier this morning. After the instances became overloaded and stopped responding everything came good again once the new instances started.
However I started getting messages from AppFabric saying that I was being throttled because there were too many requests in a given hour. Which is fair enough, it certainly was giving it hell.
In order to avoid these messages in the future I was planning on implementing an InProc cache for very short lifespan. So it checks InProc first, if not goes to AppFabric, if not goes to DB.
ObjectCache cache = MemoryCache.Default;
CacheItemPolicy policy = new CacheItemPolicy();
policy.AbsoluteExpiration = DateTimeOffset.Now.AddMinutes(5);
The questions I have are
- Is this the best way to handle the situation?
- Is this going to interfere with AppFabric Caching?
- Any issues I am overlooking?
Update
I just wanted to say I chose the above method and it works well. I was using it only for general data storage and not session state. MemoryCache with session state would not work too well on Azure due to no server affinity (as mentioned by David below).
Update 16-03-2012
After realizing the obvious I also disabled SessionState on most pages. Most of my pages don’t need it and hence this rapidly decreases my calls to cache under heavy load. I also disabled ViewState for most pages as well, just for that slightly quicker page load time.
Try this: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/hh708748.aspx