ASP.NET Core Cache Session Benefits and Overview

With Microsoft restructuring ASP.NET 5 to ASP.NET Core, NCache has introduced Session State Management for ASP.NET Core Cache to provide support with the new architecture. NCache provides flexible options to combine sessions with NCache's enhanced caching capabilities, to boost performance as a whole. You can now store the default ASP.NET Core Sessions within NCache or use NCache’s Session State Management services through extension methods on the ASP.NET Core modules to create and store custom-configured sessions that utilize NCache.

Note

This feature will only work with .NET Core applications that target the .NET Framework platform.

ASP.NET Core Cache Session Properties

Exclusive Session Locking: NCache Session Management enhances ASP.NET Core Sessions by providing exclusive session Locking to avoid deadlock and data integrity being compromised. Locking is configurable and by default, it is disabled.

Locking Release Retry: If an exclusive lock is used, locking retries are also configured. In case of concurrent requests, lock release is tried a configured number of times.

Location Affinity: NCache’s Session Management Services provide Location Affinity which manages ASP.NET Core Sessions across multiple web farms that are geographically separated. For Location Affinity, one 'primary' and one or more 'secondary' caches have to be specified for each web farm. The primary cache will be used for all local traffic, in the local region and the secondary cache(s) are of distant geographical regions. These are configured in Web.config.

Cluster Topologies: For sessions, different clustering topologies offered by NCache can be used. The Replicated topology offers load balancing of clients so that the ASP.NET Core application does not suffer during intensive traffic. If the Partition-Replica cache is used, it provides higher scalability and reliability to the application and performs faster transactions.

Reliability: By default, a session is stored in-memory of an ASP.NET process. If the process recycles or an application server goes down, session data is lost. With NCache, session data is stored outside the ASP.NET process, in a cache cluster. Any cache topology can be chosen to meet the needs of reliability. So, in case of application server unavailability, session data remains available when the ASP.NET process recycles back or the application server becomes live again.

Scalability: NCache Session uses an in-memory cache as storage, whereas a clustered cache provides even better scalability. Working in a clustered environment allows adding more servers to the session cluster at runtime; this results in more scalability and reliability for the application. Hence ASP.NET session clustering for web farms is faster and more scalable than storing them in a database.

Availability, Load Balancing, and Fault Tolerance: In a web farm environment, using NCache with ASP.NET Core Sessions provides better fault tolerance, keeping session data available at all server nodes in a clustered cache. This also results in handling a larger load because sessions can be distributed to multiple servers in the farm.

Session Lookup in Cache Made Easy: All session data in cache can be retrieved in a single call through HttpContext.Session in ASP.NET Core.

Better Performance: Session data being stored in an in-memory cache, closer to the ASP.NET application, yields maximum performance.

ASP.NET Core Session Storage Strategies

NCache provides ASP.NET Core support in two ways. First, NCache Session Management Services as an extension of ASP.NET Core Sessions. Second, ASP.NET Core Sessions with NCache Distributed Caching. This section will provide you a complete guide on using ASP.NET Core Session Storage in NCache, its configuration, and its implementation.

Note

This feature is also available in NCache Professional.

In This Section

Configure NCache ASP.NET Core Session Provider
Provides step-by-step information on configuring services and using NCache Provider for ASP.NET Core Sessions.

Configure ASP.NET Core Sessions with IDistributedCache
Explains how to configure and store ASP.NET Sessions with NCache IDistributedCache Provider.

Using NCache with ASP.NET Core
Explains how NCache ASP.NET Sessions can be used to store sessions with NCache IDistributedCache Provider.

Multi-site Session Provider
Explains how NCache Location Affinity can be configured for web farms using clustered caches distributed across multiple regions.

Session Sharing with ASP.NET
Explains how ASP.NET Core Sessions can be shared and updated with ASP.NET Sessions and vice versa.