I’m trying to force an ASP.NET site to pre-load a large number of objects into the cache on start-up. Each objects takes 2-10 seconds to generate, which means loading 1200+
You need a persistent view model store!
Perform these searches and store the results in a document database, for example. Have a look at RavenDb. With that, you can serialize any object into the database and get sub second response times querying the data.
You can then use anything to perform the work and use the ASP.NET Web app for presentation.