SignalR and Memcached for persistent Group data

Question

I am using SignalR with my ASP.NET application. What my application needs is to pressist the groups data that is updated from various servers. According to SignalR documentation it's my responsibility to do this. It means that I need to use an external server/service that will collect the data from one or more servers and I can query that data from a single place.

I first thought that MemCached is the best candidate, because it's fast and the data that I need to put there is volatile. The problem is that I need to store collections, for example: collection A with user Ids, so I can have Collection A with 2000 user ids and Collection B with 40,000 ids. The problem is that I need to update this collection and remove and insert id very quickly. I afraid that because the commands will be initiated from several servers, and the fact that I might need to read the entire collection and update it on a either web servers, the data won't be consistent. Web Server A might update the data, but Server B will read the data before Server A finished updating it. There is a concurrency conflict.

I'm searching for the best way to implement this kind of strategy in my ASP.NET 4.5 application. I think that this might be a choice to use a in-memory database or that to insure no data integrity.

I want to ask you what is the best solution for my problem.

Here's an example for my problen:

• MemCached Server - stores the collections (e.g. Collection A, B, C, D), each collection stores User Id's, which can be thousands of Ids and even much more.

• Web Servers - My Amazon EC2 web servers with SignalR installed. Can be behind load balancer. Those servers need to gain access to the memcached server and get a complete collection items by the Collection name (e.g. "Collection_23"). They need to be able to remove items (User Id's) and add Items. All this should be fast as possible.

I hope that I explained myself right. Thanks.

Answer 1

In a comment in another post it shows a link to redis provider. The link is broken, it seems that it is now integrated in the main SignalR project: https://github.com/SignalR/SignalR/tree/master/src/Microsoft.AspNet.SignalR.Redis

You have the redis nuget here: http://www.nuget.org/packages/Microsoft.AspNet.SignalR.Redis

and documentation here: http://www.asp.net/signalr/overview/signalr-20/performance-and-scaling/scaleout-with-redis

Answer 2

Alternatively, you can use Redis, like Memcached everything is served from in-memory. Redis has many other capabilities beyond a simple key-value datastore; for your specific case you might use Redis transactions, which ensures data consistency.