I'm trying to create a general-purpose, high-performance, in-memory cache for custom data in Umbraco sites. Perhaps distributed is the wrong word, maybe "replicated cache" is better. I want my cache to be in memory, eager, and work across scaled instances. Eager because I know what I need to cache ahead of time and/or fetching the data is too slow for UI. In memory for performance - Redis is great, but the TCP overhead is non-trivial and I don't want additional infrastructure for this - it is a software problem. (at least in the sense that an Umbraco site already has the infra that's required to do this, as well as much of the implementation). Working across scaled instances, because Umbraco can scale (so pub/sub and some kind of persistence). Basically, I want a cache that works exactly like the content cache, but I don't want to put Umbraco content in it.

That's understandable, but if I understood Sebastiaan correctly, they have to toss out their current solution soon, and thus it's not recommended to use the Umbraco infrastructure for this.

Well at least I know early what 2023's never-to-be-finished project is gonna be 😁

Just to echo Sebastiaan once more I took a look at the underlying repo making NuCache possible some time ago and can indeed also report that the underlying project is slowly falling apart. I took some time to multitarget the test project to see the test success on newer dotnet and a bunch failed. It also receives very little development if any. So it's properly not worth the effort in the long run to use NuCache for this. I wrote a little about what I found I relation to the open issue on the repo here if you'd like to see. It also links to the fork where I tried to update the test projects: https://github.com/mamift/CSharpTest.Net.Collections/issues/2

Am I understanding this right @Jason ? You want to use CacheRefreshers to notify others servers about something that’s changed (some own data) and not use the existing ones we have. If so I think I have done this before and can take a look tomorrow to help out if that is the case.

Yes @Warren Buckley, many thanks for the offer but I've done that before so I'm good with that part. It was more about the persistent cache itself and the prospect of potentially being able to make a nice lightweight package out of it without any chunky dependencies.

Ok no worries. I am not sure I fully understand the problem to give anymore pointers right now. My last use of CacheRefreshers was to notify servers that a Form JSON definition had changed and for other servers to update their files they had. (Was trying to patch the problem of Forms being on disk, before it all got moved into the DB).

Ah, so that's your code I decompiled 😉 You can use cache refreshers for general pub/sub, i.e. not just refreshing caches, as under the hood it's just a way to send JSON blobs to all Umbraco instances using the same db.

Yep slightly confusing name called CacheRefreshers but yep your right can send a JSON payload and do whatever really. Sorry for any bad code you may have had to read 🤪

Have you considered https://github.com/ZiggyCreatures/FusionCache

Thank you @nzdev, that does exactly what I want. And my goodness the features...

Would be good to get some feedback. I haven't tried it but it looked amazing

Yeah, it does. I'll let you know when I've got somewhere with it.