Caching entity itself in IMemoryCache in ASP.NET Core MVC with Entity Framework

Question

In an ASP.NET Core MVC app I'm using IMemoryCache in ConfigureServices():

services.AddMemoryCache();

In a controller, I originally had this code:

// List<> of POCOs:
var myLines = await _context.MyEntity.Where(somecondition).ToListAsync();

and I've changed it to:

// List<> of POCOs:
var myLines = await
    _cache.GetOrCreateAsync("mykey",async entry => {
        return
            await _context.MyEntity.Where(somecondition).ToListAsync();
    });

This works well.

But I'm wondering if it is a bad practice anyway or not.

Is it a problem caching attached POCOs?

Elendil Zheng-MSFT · Accepted Answer · 2020-04-16 10:10:00Z

1

This i very basic usage of memory cache, it can meet some basic requirement, but please consider below senario

Your POCO is changed by someone else, how would your cache know that? You'll need some sync task to sync your cache and database data
Your application is going to be delpoyed to a web farm, memery cache only works for just one machine, a request routed to another machine won't have the cache. In this senario you'll need a out of process cache such as redis or even build your own distributed cache.

So it really depends on what is your requirement, if it is simple enough, than this approach is a good practice. Otherwise you need to take the above 2 senario into consideration since these 2 are the most common issue for a cache solution.

answered Apr 16, 2020 at 10:10

Elendil Zheng-MSFT

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1 Comment

Feri Over a year ago

This is a simplified sample code; changing underlying data is tracked by some other code lines. Yes, I know this works for one server, that's not a problem in my case. I worried for attached 'state' of POCOs mostly. Thanks anyway.

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