CacheAdapter 2.5–Memcached revised

Note: For more information around the CacheAdapter, see my previous posts here, here, here and here

You may have noticed a number of updates to the CacheAdapter package on nuget as of late. These are all related to performance and stability improvements for the memcached component of the library.

However it became apparent that I needed more performance for the memcached support to make the library truly useful and perform as best as can be expected.

I started playing with optimising serialisation processes and really optimising the socket connections used to communicate with the memcached instance. As anybody who has worked with sockets before may tell you, you quickly start to look at pooling your connections to ensure you do not have to go about recreating a connection every time you want to communicate, especially if we are storing or retrieving items in a cache as this can be very frequent.

So I started implementing a pooling mechanism to increase the performance. I got to improving it to a reasonable extent, then found I would hit a hurdle where performance could be increased further but it was becoming harder and more complex to retain stability. I became lost in trying to fix the problem when a solution had already been in place for a long time.

It was about then I decided it best to simply take a dependency on the most excellent Enyim memcached client. It is fast. Really fast, and blew away everything I had done in terms of performance. So that is the essence of this update. The memcached support in the cache adapter comes courtesy of Enyim. Enjoy the extra speed that comes with it.

Note: There are no other updates to any of the other caching implementations.