After reading Steve Peschka's blog post Dedicating Servers to Distributed Cache in SharePoint 2013, I am curious to others' experience with off-loading the distributed cache service to it's own server(s) and what specific positive performance results were experienced.. and any suggestions..
Excerpt from Post:
Having my own anecdotal evidence in hand then, a few of us started asking around to try and get some thoughts from other folks on why this might be happening. Eric F. ended up providing us with a really great explanation of why you might see “flaky” or inconsistent behavior with the DC service when it’s co-located with other services, so I’ll paraphrase his comments here:
- We need 1 to 2ms response times. It’s going to struggle to deliver such fast response times if it’s sharing the server with other apps that can occupy the CPU at inopportune moments.
- The job of the DC service is to cache stuff for you so it wants to grab a bunch of memory and hold onto it. But to deliver great performance (see bullet #1), it needs to avoid swapping memory pages out to disk; if the machine runs low on memory it has to evict content from its cache. When the DC service is co-located it has to live with other apps that have their own pattern of memory usage. Those patterns will have periods where they consume a lot of memory, and then periods where (either due to GC, IIS restart, or their own cleanup) shrink back down. That’s difficult for the DC service to manage because whenever the memory usage spikes it has to empty its caches.
- Rick
