Transparent failover and restore?

[Greg Whalin]

Kevin A. Burton wrote:
> Greg Whalin wrote:
> 
>>
>> I also feel this discussion is purely academic as the only time our 
>> memcache servers go down is when we shut them down.  The server is 
>> extremely reliable in our experience.  Adding in more server side 
>> complexity could also potentially hurt this reliability as well.
> 
> 
> No way. Using cheap commodity hardware is one reason people are using 
> memcached.  Just buy cheap 32 bit processors with 4 cheap 256M DIMMs 
> (2G) and stick it in your cluster.  The cheaper the better.  Just have 
> fault tolerant software.
> 
> Cheap commodity hardware DOES fail .  Almost by definition.
> AKA not academic ;)
> 
> Kevin
> 

Though, how often do you see motherboards and memory fail on running 
machines.  Not that often in my experience.  Given you don't really need 
a drive in a memcached server, seems much less likely that you will see 
hardware failure in a memcached server compared to the average.  In all, 
it seems pretty unlikely that a memcache machine will fail, and given 
the cheap cost, one can build a pretty large cluster limiting the total 
percentage of cache lost if one of these servers does fail.