Case Study: Moonpig achieves high availability and scalable ASP.NET session performance with Alachisoft's NCache

NCache allows moonpig.com to maintain very crucial high-availability for their high traffic website by storing their ASP.NET sessions in a reliable and replicated cache storage

Moonpig, the online greeting‑card retailer experiencing rapid growth across the UK, Australia and the US, faced scaling and high‑availability problems with ASP.NET session state: InProc and SQLServer session stores could not cope with multi‑server web farms or peak loads. To solve this, Moonpig turned to Alachisoft and deployed NCache to provide reliable, scalable session storage.

Alachisoft’s NCache—an in‑memory distributed cache—was implemented to hold ASP.NET sessions in a replicated, high‑availability cache. NCache eliminated session loss during server maintenance, enabled simple round‑robin load balancing, and let Moonpig scale by adding cache servers as needed; Moonpig now runs six web servers against two NCache servers with “no discernable delay” in session loads and plans to expand NCache use into order processing.

Moonpig

Jay Jetley

Systems Architect