Memcached slower than Caching in files?

[Brian Moon]

Silvan Mühlemann | tilllate AG wrote:
> So I guess it's worth switching from Cache_Lite to memcached in our 
> clustered environment!

If you rolled your own caching system on the local filesystem, 
benchmarks would show that it is faster.  However, what you do not see 
in benchmarks is what happens to your FS under load.  Your kernel has to 
use a lot of resources to do all that file IO.  Also, a file cache is 
local only unless its is on a network file system.  And, NFS for example 
has bad latency and locking issues when you are dealing with thousands 
of requests per second.  Lastly, something has to clean up all those 
files.  No fun.

So, enter memcached.  It scales much better than a file based cache. 
Sure, its slower.  I have even seen some tests where its slower than the 
database.  But, tests are not the real world.  In the real world, 
memcached does a great job.

Of course, this is just all my opinion.  FWIW, we have seen a doubling 
of our traffic at dealnews since the week of Thanksgiving.  Memcached 
has given just just a couple of problems.  Most of our issues is still 
with the database involving searches.

-- 

Brian Moon
-------------
http://dealnews.com/
It's good to be cheap =)