Ah, I found the CopyOnRead flag in the cache configuration.
Unfortunately, it seems to have the same behaviour regardless of the setting for this flag. If I create an example like the below, it seems that querying the same element from the cache many times takes about the same amount of time in both cases. Visual Studio also reports large numbers of GC episodes while it cleans up the large freed MyCacheClass instances. Is this flag only applicable to Java contexts? I did also try setting KeepBinaryInStore to true, though there was no noticeable difference. [Serializable] public class MyCacheClass { public String name = String.Empty; private byte[] localData = null; public MyCacheClass(String _name) { name = _name; localData = new byte[4000000]; } } class Program { static void Main(string[] args) { IIgnite ignite = Ignition.Start(); // Add a cache to Ignite ICache<String, MyCacheClass> cache = ignite.CreateCache<String, MyCacheClass> (new CacheConfiguration() { Name = "TestCache", CopyOnRead = false, KeepBinaryInStore = true }); // Add a cache item cache.Put("First", new MyCacheClass("FirstItem")); // query back the cache items for (int i = 0; i < 30000; i++) { MyCacheClass first = cache.Get("First"); } } *From:* Raymond Wilson [mailto:raymond_wil...@trimble.com] *Sent:* Monday, February 13, 2017 11:35 AM *To:* user@ignite.apache.org *Subject:* Effective size limit for cache items in Ignite Hi, What is the practical size limit for items in an Ignite cache? I suspect the answer is something “As large as the memory you have to hold it”, but my question is more aimed at the practicality of large items in a cache due to the overhead of pulling copies of the items out of the cache in response to a Cache.Get() request. For instance, let’s say I had cache items in the 64Kb size range, and had requests that commonly refer to those cache items to perform some work on them in response to a request. Will each Cache.Get() request require an extraction and repackaging of the cache item prior to handing it back to the caller as a new (copied) version of that cache item, or is there a way for just a reference to the cache item to be returned to the caller? I understand there is a way to designate the information in a cache as just blobs of data with no serialisation semantics. In this case does a Cache.Get() return a pointer or a copy (with a local locking semantic to prevent change)? Thanks, Raymond.