Caching is not as easy as you think it is
For the past year I have been playing around with azure caching and learning a lot. I have got frustrated, confused and then finally there seems to be light at the end of the tunnel. This is what I've learnt from my experience so far: 1. I have no idea why they allow co-located caching because if you are having a decent sized cache with lots of reads and writes, this is unusable. Use dedicated cache role - only that can handle significant load. 2. Caching which uses BLOB storage as a persistence mechanism has problems if it accesses BLOB storage frequently because items are not remaining in the cache. I was flummoxed by this problem but worked around it because in my case, I was able to get away with checking for the existence of the BLOB which is much faster than trying to download it every time (my data just requires the existence check). 3. Don't be unhappy with your code if you have x-small and small instances and your sites with caching roles do not perform well. ...