System architecture best practices - memcached + webfarms

[Paul Querna]

Earl Cahill wrote:
> FWIW, I just bought one of these, which can hold 32 gigs of ram (16 x 2)
> 
> http://www.sun.com/servers/x64/x2200/
> 
> So, that might replace fourteen or fifteen of your two gig boxes.  They
> say the box can support 64 gigs, but I am not sure I believe them.


Yeah, but then what happens when that one machine crashes or needs to
reboot?

You just lost 32 gigs of your cache.  Unless you are like facebook and
have 200 of these machines, replacing a dozen small nodes with one large
one doesn't always make sense.

I believe LiveJournal tried this a long time ago, and found the failure
of one super large machine was enough to overload their DB machines.....
Thoughts from LJer/Brad?

-Paul