As covered in Chapter 2, Getting Started with AppFabric Caching and Chapter 3, Windows Server AppFabric Caching — Advanced Use Cases, Windows Server AppFabric provides a robust, highly available distributed caching feature which allows you to store objects that change somewhat infrequently in a fast, logically centralized but physically distributed in-memory cache, known as a cache cluster.
Each cache cluster has one or more cache hosts which store the objects you want to store in memory. When your application requests an object, the cache cluster checks to see if the object is available and if so, returns it to the application.
Optionally, you may choose to implement a local cache as part of your application. This has the advantage of keeping the cached objects as close to your application as possible and only asking the cache cluster for the object when it is not available in the local cache.
As you can imagine, it is very important that the memory allocated...