Velocity Speeds High-Traffic Applications

Velocity, a distributed, in-memory data caching system to speed data access, was released in a June 2008 preview, and it could help developers build very high-throughput Web applications on ASP.NET. Velocity stores copies of application data in memory on multiple servers, speeding access to data by applications such as high-traffic Web applications and enabling them to exploit much more physical memory than would be available on any single server. However, organizations that want to use distributed in-memory caching software on current projects can already turn to more mature systems available for free or from commercial vendors.

Expanding Memory with Multiple Servers

A typical Velocity system consists of the following:

• A Web application (such as a social network application) which includes the Velocity client component
• A database that stores data used by the application (such as a list of friends for a user)
• A collection of cache servers for in-memory data storage that are running