Everything2 and memcached

[Brad Fitzpatrick]

Jay gave me permission to repost this conversation here.

Looks like the Everything2.com people will be adding memcache support,
because all their web processes are full of cached data that isn't shared.
(the first limit people hit... then you do IPC::Shareable or something,
and hit per-machine limits...)

Anyway, good to see more people using it.

I haven't heard from most people on this list about why they're using it,
though.

Current users seem to include:

LiveJournal  (main user)
Slashdot     (using it for 15 GB+ of comments, adding more)
SourceForge  (starting to work on it?  (python support))
Everything   (starting to work on it)

I'm not sure why it's in FreeBSD or Gentoo.  Who's using it there?

- Brad


---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: 08 Aug 2003 14:35:37 -0400
From: Jay Bonci <jay@bonci.com>
To: Brad Fitzpatrick <brad@danga.com>
Subject: Re: memcached and custom kernels

Right now we cache pre-made objects into webserver proc memory (use vars
$foo sorta stuff). It's not pretty and makes it memory intensive for us.
Memcached is a way for us to cut down our memory footprint, and
distribute some of the object hell going forward.

I'll let you know when we have that all subclassed in and stable =)

Thanks

		--jay

On Fri, 2003-08-08 at 14:30, Brad Fitzpatrick wrote:
> Let me know when you do and I'll add you guys to our as-of-yet-unmade
> "Users Page".
>
> If you're having any database problems now, I can't recommend memcached
> enough.  It was a night & day difference for us.  We hated blocking so
> much, that memcached itself never blocks for anything.
>
> - Brad
>
>
> On Fri, 8 Aug 2003, Jay Bonci wrote:
>
> > Thanks for getting back to me. Looks like we'll be putting in memcached
> > support for ecore's nodecache, as it makes a lot of sense (when I get
> > the free time).
> >
> > Slashdot's using it now, so hey, good enough for them... ;)
> >
> > Thanks again,
> >
> >
> > 		--jay
> >
> > On Fri, 2003-08-08 at 03:58, Brad Fitzpatrick wrote:
> > > Accidentally ran across an old mailing list post of yours.
> > >
> > > Just mailing you to let you know you don't need a custom whiz-bang kernel
> > > to run memcached.  Memcache only depends on libevent, which selects
> > > between select, poll, kqueue, and epoll at run time.  Linux 2.5 supports
> > > epoll.  There are patches to make 2.4 do it, which we use.
> > >
> > > There's also a patch to libevent (going in after 0.7a?) that adds realtime
> > > signal support, wihch 2.4 supports, and is almost as fast as epoll.
> > >
> > > But the point is:  memcached itself will run with anything.  select/poll
> > > suck a little, but they're perfectly acceptable.  But if you want to
> > > use hardly any CPU, definitely go the epoll route.  (or kqueue on FreeBSD)
> > >
> > > - Brad
> >