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<TITLE>Re: Largest production memcached install?</TITLE>
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<FONT FACE="Verdana, Helvetica, Arial"><SPAN STYLE='font-size:12.0px'>No clue if we’re the largest installation, but Facebook has roughly 200 dedicated memcached servers in its production environment, plus a small number of others for development and so on. A few of those 200 are hot spares. They are all 16GB 4-core AMD64 boxes, just because that’s where the price/performance sweet spot is for us right now (though it looks like 32GB boxes are getting more economical lately, so I suspect we’ll roll out some of those this year.)<BR>
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We have a home-built management and monitoring system that keeps track of all our servers, both memcached and other custom backend stuff. Some of our other backend services are written memcached-style with fully interchangeable instances; for such services, the monitoring system knows how to take a hot spare and swap it into place when a live server has a failure. When one of our memcached servers dies, a replacement is always up and running in under a minute.<BR>
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All our services use a unified database-backed configuration scheme which has a Web front-end we use for manual operations like adding servers to handle increased load. Unfortunately that management and configuration system is highly tailored to our particular environment, but I expect you could accomplish something similar on the monitoring side using Nagios or another such app.<BR>
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All that said, I agree with the earlier comment on this list: start small to get some experience running memcached in a production environment. It’s easy enough to expand later once you have appropriate expertise and code in place to make things run smoothly.<BR>
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-Steve<BR>
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On 5/3/07 8:06 AM, "Sam Lavery" <sam.lavery@gmail.com> wrote:<BR>
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</SPAN></FONT><BLOCKQUOTE><FONT FACE="Verdana, Helvetica, Arial"><SPAN STYLE='font-size:12.0px'>Does anyone know what the largest installation of memcached currently is? I'm considering putting it on 100+ machines(solaris/mod_perl), and would love to hear any tips people have for managing a group of that size(and larger). Additionally, are there any particular patches I should try out for this specific platform? <BR>
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Thanks in advance,<BR>
Sam<BR>
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