The Speed of memcached

Peter Alberer peter.alberer at wu-wien.ac.at
Wed Oct 12 10:48:06 PDT 2005


Hi there,

i have created a simple tcl-based client api to memcached for use in the 
aolserver webserver. after the completion of the client api, my first 
tests showed
that the memcached server is quite slow when saving values, compared to 
my database (postgresql 8.0). i would like to mention, that i only open 
the communication sockets once for all the
operations and cache it in the api.

i created a test-loop that saves 100 different keys (test1-100) with the 
same value (value length is about 1000 characters) to 2 different 
memcached servers (50 each),
rereads all of the values and deletes all of them afterwards. (no multi 
get, just 100 single get commands)

Here are the results measured in ms:

Memcache SET: Processed 100 items in 4060 ms

Memcache GET: Processed 100 items in 438 ms

Memcache DELETE: Processed 100 items in 82 ms

The set command is quite slow, compared to the get and delete command. 
are the numbers i am getting here reasonable? interestingly,
the VERY FIRST set command completes in 0-1 ms, but ALL of the 
subsequent ones take 40-41ms. this is something i can even see when i 
manually
set keys via telnet. the first set command returns STORED immediately, 
but after that a very small delay is visible for every set command. 
changing the length of the value
does not  affect the 40ms for storing the value, just the get operation 
gets faster.

have others measured the performance of the different memcached operations?

i would be very glad to hear about your observations!

TIA, peter

ps: the system where the memcached daemon is running is a power5-redhat 
AS4 server. kernel=2.6.9-11.EL


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