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Sunday, October 26 2008, 9:13 PM

As most people probably can discern by reading the backlog of content entries here, I'm a fan of Memcache. It makes database driven applications crazy fast when used properly, and can be damn simple to integrate if your code is set up properly. I integrated it with the monitoring system I wrote at work a while back to take some of the load off MySQL, and it's worked exceptionally well.

While checking something else out in the monitoring system, I ran a report on the current Memcache status, and was kind of blown away. The system currently consists of 16 servers, 15 of which have memcached running on them, with 512MB allocated on each. That's 7.5GB of cache memory, for those that don't like doing math. I'll let the report speak for itself...

In just the current running processes, there is over 15 years of combined uptime, with 9 memcached processes up for over a year... 183 terabytes of data read from the memcached processes and 199 terabytes written. That's a lot of uptime and a lot of data! I've got a couple of crash-happy servers in the cluster too. Without those, the numbers would be higher.

For those wondering, the write number is higher than the read number because the latest snapshot data is stored into memcache for easy retrieval each time data is collected. The read numbers are part of the snapshot storage process as well, and would also be higher if there was more activity on the web interface.

memcache mysql work

Wednesday, January 02 2008, 2:27 AM

In yet another pointless round of code updates to my site, I've made most of the site memcache-enabled. Memcache is a client/server system that allows for caching of data that you plan on accessing repeatedly, such as relatively static information from a database. For dynamic sites, this allows you to take a large amount of load off of your database server(s), and instead place that load on memcache, which is going to be faster and less CPU-intensive in just about every case. This makes for happier servers and faster site performance all around.

Why am I doing this? Mainly for the practice. I use memcache in some applications at work, and I'm constantly looking for ways to speed up those applications and make them more efficient. Plus, if I post something really cool and my site gets slashdotted, it will be able to weather the storm much better. I think.

There's still a few things I have to do yet, but if you look at the little stats area at the bottom of the site layout, you should see that most pages only show a few database queries, and many more memcache hits. There will always be a few database queries per page, but I'm shooting for five or less on each page.

memcache siteupdates

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