asp.net caching: Caching XML across web farm -- asp.net caching

Caching XML across web farm

Dave
9/1/2005 12:34:21 PM

asp.net caching:

I'm retrieving XML from several external webservices and compiling it into a
single document based on our requirements. Doing so takes 15-30 seconds. I
wanted to cache this XML for a period of time so other users who request the
same profile won't have to wait for the same data.

However, we are hosting our app in a 3 server webfarm and each server won't
know about the cached data if it resides on another server. I've tried the
article described in http://www.eggheadcafe.com/articles/20030420.asp but it
seems the when I try to push the XML to the other servers using the
webrequest, the session_start fires on those copies of the app and resets the
user's session.

I guess this makes sense, since I'm actually requesting a page on the
application causing the global.asax Session_start event to fire and since I'm
not passing a sessionId when using the WebRequest. Just wondering if there
is another solution.

Re: Caching XML across web farm

Oliver Wong
9/6/2005 6:51:39 PM

[quoted text, click to view]

Perhaps you can introduce some sort of hiearchy among the servers. Have
one machine be the "master" who takes care of caching the XML data, and have
the other machines read from the master rather than directly from the
original sources.

- Oliver