High-Performance Caching Layer with System.IO.Hashing and Custom Policies
Caching isn’t just an optimization — for high-demand apps it’s a necessity. This guide builds an intelligent caching layer from the ground up, using fast non-cryptographic hashing for cache keys and custom eviction policies that go well beyond simple LRU.
What you’ll learn
- Why conventional caching struggles: key collisions, memory-hungry string keys, naive eviction, and poor hit ratios
- Using
System.IO.Hashing(XXHash64) for fast, efficient cache-key generation, with algorithm benchmarks - Designing policy-based and composite eviction strategies that are cost- and size-aware
- Building the high-performance cache core, plus cache warming, preloading, and distributed-cache integration
- Benchmark comparisons against
MemoryCacheand Redis on latency, memory efficiency, and hit ratio — and when the extra complexity is worth it
A great read if you have high-traffic or memory-constrained .NET workloads that need more than an off-the-shelf cache.