Scaling Entity Framework Core Apps With Distributed Caching

By Rashid Khan

High-traffic .NET applications that need to access relational databases like SQL Server are increasingly using Entity Framework (EF) Core. EF Core is the latest version of the Entity Framework Object Relational (O/R) Mapping framework from Microsoft. EF Core runs on both standard .NET Framework and the new .NET Core. EF Core simplifies database programming and speeds up .NET application development.

But, high-traffic EF Core applications face performance bottlenecks under heavy user traffic. And, this is because although the application tier scales nicely for handling increased user traffic, the database becomes the bottleneck. EF Core itself doesn’t resolve this problem unless you incorporate distributed caching in your EF Core application. NCache is a very popular distributed cache for .NET that I will use in this article.

This article goes over the techniques you can use from within an EF Core application for caching various types of data. NCache has implemented “Extension Methods” in EF Core that allows you to very easily make caching calls from appropriate places in your application. And, this article explains what you can do with those calls in order to benefit from caching.

In the end, this article covers what a typical distributed cache architecture looks like.