libmemcache and pgmemcache...

[Sean Chittenden]

>> Howdy.  Last night I gave a presentation on pgmemcache and libmemcache
>> to the San Francisco PostgreSQL User Group.  For the interested 
>> parties,
>> the presentation is available at:
>>
>> http://people.FreeBSD.org/~seanc/pgmemcache/pgmemcache.pdf
>
> Hi Sean / list,
>
> pgmemcache is just about exactly what I'm looking for - excellent job!
> The way I'm thinking of using it in my application is to have "for each
> row after insert/update/delete" triggers in Postgres, which do a
> memcached "delete".  Thus, when the database is modified, the cache is
> automatically invalidated.  The checking of the cache, and the
> population thereof, would be done elsewhere.

Ah, excellent.  That's basically how I use it now[1].

> Anyway, on to my question... how mature / stable / well-tested is this
> work?  I'm trying it out on my dev box here, and so far it's behaving,
> but I'm a little reluctant to install it on our production server
> without hearing maybe a few encouraging noises from other people... I'm
> timid like that ;-)

Heh, I don't blame you.  I've been using it for about 2-3 weeks now 
(one in a half in its current revision) without any failures.  I was 
exceedingly paranoid in the way that I wrote it.  Assuming your 
memcached server is working well and not violating the protocol (ps, 
Brad: reminder: commit my patch to docs/protocol *grin*), you won't 
have any problems.  I've thumped on my setup without any incident, 
memory leaks, or crashes.  Since this is still so new, I haven't 
collected a list of users or success stories, but I'm very interested 
in them.  If you have questions on best practices, I seem to be 
settling in on a good set of policies.

> P.S. Why not call it "libmemcache*d*" / "pgmemcache*d*"?  Seems more
> obvious, given the name of the thing it's all based on.

Good question, originally I had the library as libmemcached, but 
realized that the library name isn't correct.  The daemon is called 
memcached, meaning that memcached is providing the memcache service.  
libmemcache is a library for using that memory caching layer, not for 
using the daemon.  libmemcached means to me, an API to control 
memcached (ie, invoking memcached via the command line).  -sc


PS  If anyone is interested in helping fund work to add ON COMMIT 
triggers to PostgreSQL (would dramatically improve data synchronization 
between memcached and PostgreSQL), please contact me off list.

-- 
Sean Chittenden