memcached purging and LRU

[Sergio Salvatore]

Anatoly,

First, thanks for your great response.  The
implementation makes sense to me now.  In my
development environment, I purposely set the total
memcache pool to 16 MB so I could see what would
happen under low memory conditions.  Since I'm trying
to cache very small items, I also wrote a utility app
that would artificially populate memcache with data of
a certain size.  So, I could say, please add 1000
cache entries that are each 4000 bytes.  Once I tried
to do this, I eventually ran into the "out of memory"
problem.

If I understand your reply correctly, the reason I ran
into this problem was that the chunk I was trying to
add was of a size that I had never allocated a single
slab for.  Right?

Realistically, I don't anticipate running into this
problem in production when we have multiple memcache
instances which add up to many hundreds of megabytes
of memory.  But, I would like to have a way to
gracefully handle a condition such as this.  Anyway, I
think your solution of arbitrarily allocating a few
empty slabs would do that for me.  

Thanks again for your help.  Any additional advice you
can provide would be greatly appreciated.

/sergio

--- Anatoly Vorobey <mellon at pobox.com> wrote:

> On Fri, Feb 11, 2005 at 02:42:36PM -0800, Sergio
> Salvatore wrote:
> > understand with memcached's slab allocator that I
> may
> > run out of appropriately sized slabs before my
> overall
> > memory is exhausted, but other posts that I've
> > encountered seem to indicate that there's an LRU
> > purging method in cases like this.  Is this
> correct? 
> > If so, why would you ever get an "out of memory"
> > problem?
> 
> Basically you get an "out of memory error" if you
> already filled all
> available memory with items of various sizes, and
> now you're trying
> to store a new item with a very different size -
> such that you haven't
> stored items in the same size class before.
> 
> In more detail: as you're storing items, each item
> is put into the 
> appropriate size class, which currently go by powers
> of 2: 128 bytes,
> 256 bytes, 512bytes, 1k, 2k, 4k, 8k... The size of
> the item is roughly 
> the size of its key + size of its data + a fixed
> header, and all this
> taken together will determing into which LRU queue
> it will go. There's 
> a separate LRU queue for each class. 
> 
> As the cache is filled in initially, memcached
> allocates chunks of 1Mb 
> of memory to a class whenever it needs to store a
> new item into it and 
> there's no free slots available. It chops up that
> 1Mb into slots of the 
> appropriate size for that class and makes them
> available. 
> 
> When all the memory you've given to memcached has
> been exhausted by 
> this, it starts to remove items from LRU queues in
> order to put in new 
> ones. But it only does so on an individual class
> basis. So that, for 
> instance, if you're trying to store an item of total
> size 10k, memcached 
> will look at the free slots it has for the 16k
> class, and if it has 
> none, it'll throw away an existing item from that
> class (the one that 
> hasn't been requested for the longest time) and let
> your new item take 
> its slot. However, if there are no existing items in
> the LRU for that
> class, and no free slots either, because when the
> cache had been filling
> an item of that size had never been stored and a
> chunk of 1Mb had never 
> been given to this class, memcached gives up and
> returns the error.
> 
> 
> > If memcached doesn't have LRU purging, is there a
> way
> > to implement this on top of the daemon?  
> 
> Memcached does have LRU purging, but it doesn't have
> one global LRU for 
> all items, only a bunch of separate LRUs for
> different classes based on 
> item sizes.
> 
> If the problem you described must be avoided, a
> crude and quick way to 
> do that would be to send to memcached, right after
> the server is 
> started, dummy items of all classes that you could
> possibly store in 
> the future, to make the server allocate at least one
> 1Mb chunk to each 
> class. 
> 
> -- 
> avva
> "There's nothing simply good, nor ill alone" -- John
> Donne
> 
> 


		
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