Best practice: profile before adding memcached?

[howard chen]

On 2/6/07, Jason Edgecombe <jedgecombe at carolina.rr.com> wrote:
> Brian Moon wrote:
> >> at the time the developer is writing the query, they should make sure
> >> the query is fast and efficient, if they are not sure, use the explain
> >> statements.
> >
> > Sure, but his question is specifically about adding memcached to an
> > existing application.  In that case, you are past the explain stage.
> > He needs to learn where the bottlenecks are for his application.  They
> > could not be SQL related at all.  We have found there are large blocks
> > of code that we want to skip and memcache the resulting data from them.
> >
> I'm actually not past the "explain" stage yet.  :( This application was
> coded in a hurry to meet a deadline. Now the site is experiencing
> growing pains, so now optimization is a priority.
> I'm a volunteer developer for the site, I just started a week ago.
>
> Jason
>

For your case: you should solve the slow query first (if any).

After that, try to find some frequently used queries for optimizing

>> mysqlsla is a good tool for these two jobs (http://hackmysql.com/mysqlsla)

Finally, depending on the nature of your apps, you might consider ...

a. use Squid in front of your web sever
b. application caching (e.g. smarty, apc, memcached)
c. database replication