Background :
Our application uses 'static' caches and cache size is about 100MB. Data synchronisation is important between load-balanced servers. Using enterprise cache We validated Microsoft Appfabric and NCache distributed caching applications. For our application, both Appfabric and Ncache are a bit heavy weight. Initial cache load also took a lot longer for Appfabric and NCache.
As a result, we built an in house distributed cache application.
Pros :
Highly scalable
Easy to implement
Low foot print, thus better performance
Cons :
Not tested for frequently changing caches
Here's high level architectural diagram for the Distributed Caching Mechanism for the Load Balanced Servers
