Any alternatives to Memcache on Google App engine?

Question

I am currently using the Memcache service provided by GAE to cache content on the server. The current size of the cache is close to 20~30MB.

Initially the cache had a lifetime of 6-7 hours .. with increasing traffic, the lifetime of the cache has fallen to 20 minutes.

We are planning to increase the cache size to 1-2GBs. Are there any alternative implementations of Distributed Caching on GAE we can use?

The List of methods that I have already tried are mentioned below. But, these steps do not fix our need to have better caching service on GAE

• Using Memcache (cons - limited cache size)
• Store object in the Instance Memory (cons - data consistency across instances cannot be maintained)
• Compressing JAVA Objects being stored ( slight improvement - only 20% improvement in lifetime of cache)

Answer 1

Since you were originally relying on a cache of 6-7 hours, this sounds like an excellent use case for taking advantage of Google's Edge Cache. This is, in theory, a free cache based on Google's distributed caching of websites.

Basically, you want to set caching headers such as:

Cache-Control: public, max-age=600

See this SO answer and this Google Groups post.