What is a BLOB cache in SharePoint and how to use it?

Hi Friends,

In this article, we are going to learn what is a BLOB cache and how to configure it.

The term BLOB means Binary Large Objects. BLOB cache is one of the disk-based caching techniques used in the SharePoint applications which has large amounts of Media content (Video, Audio and Images etc.,) and heavy user traffic.

So basically this method is used to improve the performance of a SharePoint Application. You can also find some of the other SharePoint performance improvement techniques here.

Disk-based caching techniques are extremely fast which eliminates the need for database round trips. BLOBs are retrieved from the database once and stored on the Web client(WFE server). Further requests are served from the cache and trimmed based on security.

Note: If you are using Image Renditions in the application, then BLOB Cache is the pre-requisite.

We can enable/disable the BLOB cache by modifying the web.config file of the SharePoint web application.
By Default, BLOB cache is disabled. Below is how it looks like.

<BlobCache location="C:\blobCache" path="\.(gif|jpg|png|css|js)$" maxSize="10" enabled="false" />

- Location is the directory where the cached files will be stored.
- Path specifies which files(Ex: mov|mp3|mp4|mpeg|mpg) are cached based on the file extension.
- maxSize is the maximum allowable size of the disk-based cache in gigabytes.

- enabled is a Boolean that disables or enables the cache.

To turn ON the BLOB, just make the property enabled as true as shown below.

<BlobCache location="C:\blobCache" path="\.(gif|jpg|png|css|js)$" maxSize="10" enabled="true" />

Note : change the location attribute to specify a directory that has enough space to accommodate the cache size.


Hope this helps...