Memcached in Production.

[Sara Sioux]

Hey All!

I just wanted to let you know that I have successfully implemented
memcached in production on my site www.melodramatic.com.  We're using
the PHP client-api and everything seems to be working great, (for the
most part.)

I haven't noticed a significant load decrease in my database yet, but I
haven't yet identified all of the queries that would be good candidates
for caching, I'm expecting that this implementation will be a constantly
evolving process.  I am currently in the process of re-writing all of
the code for the site from the ground up, and I will be writing
memcached in from the start so I'm hoping it will be much smoother and
more efficient in implementation when I build in support for it.

Currently the lag that seems to be harming the site the most, is right
when the page first loads, and it tries to make the TCP/IP connection to
the memcached server.  Once the connection is made everything loads
quickly, but at first it lags sometimes in excess of 30 seconds trying
to initiate the first connection.  Has anyone else experienced this?  Do
you have any suggestions for how to speed up the start of the pages?
I'm wondering if the cause is the largely untested PHP API, or if it's
just a slow and shitty network, or if it's bad server configs, or what.
Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you for developing this super-neat open source tool.  I am very
hopeful about the benefits that I will soon see on the site as
everything gets ironed out.

Much Love,
Sara