After switching a couple of database calls to cache, we actually had worse performance. We noticed a huge jump in CLR time and response time according to new relic. Please s
Network quotas have three variations:
In your performance test I suspect that the concurrent connections limit is to blame, from MSDN:
Each cache offering has a different limit on the number of connections that can be open simultaneously to the same cache ... Applications that use Windows Azure Caching must understand how connections are opened to the Caching Service. Each cache offering has a different limit on the number of connections that can be open simultaneously to the same cache.
Source: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/articles/cache-dotnet-how-to-use-service/
If that does not help much then you might consider comparing different concurrency models. AppFabric supports optimistic and pessimistic concurrency models, see http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee790890.aspx for more info on this.