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I recently discovered memcached which is a distributed, object caching system originally developed by Brad Fitzpatrick of LiveJournal fame. You can think of memcached as a giant hash table that can run on multiple servers which automatically handles maintaining the balance of objects hashed to each server and transparently fetches/removes objects from over the network if they aren't on the same machine that is accessing an object in the hash table. Although this sounds fairly simple, there is a lot of grunt work in building a distributed object cache which handles data partitioning across multiple servers and hides the distributed nature of the application from the developer. memcached is a well integrated into the typical LAMP stack and is used by a surprising number of high traffic websites including Slashdot, Facebook, Digg, Flickr and Wikipedia. Below is what C# code that utilizes memcached would look like sans exception handling code