Working with ASP.NET Core IDistributedCache Provider for NCache

By Cesar Aguirre

As we learned last time, when I covered in-memory caching with ASP.NET Core, a cache is a storage layer between an application and an external resource (a database, for example) used to speed up future requests to that resource. In this post, let’s use ASP.NET Core IDistributedCache abstractions to write a data caching layer using NCache.

What’s NCache?

From NCache official page, "NCache is an Open Source in-memory distributed cache for .NET, Java, and Node.js applications." Among other things, we can use NCache as a database cache, NHibernate 2nd-level cache, Entity Framework cache, and web cache for sessions and responses.

NCache comes in three editions: Open Source, Professional, and Enterprise. The Open Source version supports up to two nodes and its cache server is only available for .NET Framework version 4.8. For a complete list of differences, check NCache edition comparison. One of the NCache key features is performance. Based on their own benchmarks, "NCache can linearly scale to achieve 2 million operations per second with a 5-server cache cluster."

How to install NCache on a Windows machine?

Let’s see how to install an NCache server on a Windows machine. For this, we need a Windows installer and have a trial license key. Let’s install NCache Enterprise edition, version 5.2 SP1.

After running the installer, we need to select the installation type from three options: Cache server, remote client, and Developer/QA. Let’s choose Cache Server.