Is memcached really faster than MySQL on very simple query?

[Perrin Harkins]

On Thu, 2006-07-13 at 11:02 -0400, Greg Whalin wrote:
> I never considered the benefit to memcached as being a store that is
> faster than our db.  The true benefit to memcached shows when you have
> to scale your app beyond a single unloaded db.  DB machines are
> expensive.  Memcache machines are cheap.  DB environment can be hairy to
> scale.  Memcached is easy to scale.

It's not so hard to replicate MySQL for read-only queries across
multiple machines.  Memcached should handle concurrency better though,
since it doesn't need to dedicate a thread to each connection.

> I also see little benefit to using memcached as a query cache.  We use
> it as an object cache.  We have objects that require several sql queries
> to build, so serializing them and shoving them in cache is a huge win
> for us.

Caching at a higher level is a bigger win, but query caching will
definitely help some systems.

- Perrin