Reducing the load on transaction-intensive systems through distributed caching

Scania is an international trucks, buses and engines manufacturer with sales and service organization in more than 100 countries all over the globe (Scania, 2011). In 2011 alone, Scania delivered over 80 000 vehicles, which is an increase by a margin of 26% from the previous year. The company continues to deliver more trucks each year while expanding to other areas of the world, which means that the data traffic is going to increase remarkably in the transaction- intensive fleet management system (FMS). This increases the need for a scalable system; adding more sources to handle these requests in parallel. Distributed caching is one technique that can solve this issue. The technique makes applications and systems more scalable, and it can be used to reduce load on the underlying data sources. The purpose of this thesis is to evaluate whether or not distributed caching is a suitable technical solution for Scania FMS. The aim of the study is to identify scenarios in FMS where a distributed cache solution could be of use, and to test the performance of two distributed cache products while simulating these scenarios. The results from the tests are then used to evaluate the distributed cache products and to compare distributed caching performance to a single database. The products evaluated in this thesis are Alachisoft NCache and Microsoft Appfabric. The results from the performance tests show that that NCache outperforms AppFabric in all aspects. In conclusion, distributed caching has been demonstrated to be a viable option when scaling out the system