Rovastar:The output cache will be stored in memory you want to access this memory from another machine? I don't think that is possible.
That was one idea, to put it into a pool, or possibly wire up an alternative storage location (ala: memcached), that is shared among the servers. I was hoping someone would just say "Wow, you didn't know about FooSharedSpace, learn to google" or something similar.
Rovastar: Or do you want move this cache information in memory to another server's memory? *shrug* Don't think this can be done either.
Not move, but copy it to another machines memory. Effectively take the cache that was just created on server 1, and push it out to server 2 and server 3.
Rovastar: There might be some programmable way to do this but it beyond the scope of these forums. Maybe forums.Asp.net can help you.
Our application isn't in .net, and our IIS modules are in native C++.
Rovastar: It sounds to me like you need to tier your web architecture better (it sounds like you are not doing it at all) so the heavy tasks that you want to cache are fixed on one or two tiers away from the other tiers (frond end, etc). This way you can have memory heavy machines on these app tiers for each task and cache them.
We don't have heavy "tasks", we have heavy "users". The task weight varies order of magnitudes based on the user type / state. It makes is a challenge to balance based on the good old "all profile updates happen on box X". Our solution was to allow all machines to accomplish all tasks, so when a heavy task hits a box, the adaptive load balancer will automatically route new tasks (even of the same type) to boxes that aren't loaded down.
Rovastar: Either way to use the caching you will still need to go to the same boxes and you will possibily need another load balancering setup to control the sticky/affinity for this app tier. So I don't understand the comments that 'sticky is often the exact opposite of what we require'.
See my last response for why 'sticky is often the exact opposite of what we require'.
By the way, sincere thanks for taking the time to try to help me out Rovastar, I know I have a complex issue. It seems like their are no obvious, easy answers that I missed on google thus far.