<p>We deployed a live, fresh, swanky site using preview 3 including rigorous stress testing. </p>

<p>Page Output caching was our saviour and afforded us the ability to meet our performance contractual requirements.</p>

<p>My question is, is there a difference between action <code>OutputCacheFilter</code> and page output caching?</p>

<p>Is the action output caching faster than page output caching?</p>

[{'answer_id': 11290, 'author': 'Haacked', 'author_id': 598, 'author_profile': 'https://Stackoverflow.com/users/598', 'pm_score': 3, 'selected': True, 'text': '<p>Internally, the OutputCacheAttribute (aka output cache filter) uses the same internal mechanism as <a href="http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hdxfb6cy.aspx" rel="nofollow noreferrer">page output caching</a> (aka the @OutputCache directive).</p>\n\n<p>Therefore, it\'s not any faster than page output caching. However, with MVC, you really can\'t use page output caching via the @OutputCache directive in MVC because we render the view (aka page) <strong>after</strong> the action runs. So you would gain very little benefit.</p>\n\n<p>With the output cache filter, it does the correct thing and does not execute the action code if the result is in the output cache. Hope that helps. :)</p>\n'}, {'answer_id': 13119, 'author': 'Ricky', 'author_id': 653, 'author_profile': 'https://Stackoverflow.com/users/653', 'pm_score': 1, 'selected': False, 'text': '<p>Just be aware that there currently is a bug if you call Html.RenderAction(..) on an Action that is marked to be cached. Instead of the specific action being cached, the entire page gets cached. I reported this on codeplex already and it seems to be a known issue:\n<a href="http://www.codeplex.com/aspnet/WorkItem/View.aspx?WorkItemId=2062" rel="nofollow noreferrer">Calling &lt;% HTML.RenderAction&lt;...>(...); %> to an Action with [OutputCache(..)] causes entire page to cache.</a></p>\n'}]
['https://Stackoverflow.com/questions/10661', 'https://Stackoverflow.com', 'https://Stackoverflow.com/users/209/']