uses for memcache

[Jon Drukman]

Cahill, Earl wrote:
> Just wondering in what other ways people are using memcache beyond 
> perhaps a simple database cache or the like.

i am using it to track succesful/unsuccesful hits to our search engine. 
  if i see a spike in unsuccessful hits i know to investigate.

also since caching search results was important (we get many searches 
per second) but difficult (many things can change that would invalidate 
a certain set of results), i fudged it by keying on the md5 of the sql 
query used.  i used memcache to measure the effectiveness of this 
approach to memcache by logging the # of searches and the # that could 
be served by memcached results.  turned out to be something like a 66% 
hit rate, which was pretty impressive for me considering that we did 
absolutely no work on making it cache-able.

-jsd-