Largest production memcached install?

[Paul Querna]

Cal Heldenbrand wrote:
> Steve,
> 
> Just curious what are the OS load averages on your database servers? 
> Have you expanded facebook to the point where losing most of the
> memcache servers would cause your entire application to grind to a halt?
> 
> During my initial thoughts on integrating memcache into our product, I
> could see it eventually becoming a crutch and we wouldn't have enough
> database hardware to support the application anymore.  I wonder if
> that's a good thing or a bad thing?

Its a bad thing, to be in a situation where your database cannot handle
several memcache failures, or even a reset of a significant number
during low-load.

But the solution is: don't scale the database hardware, partition your
data into smaller sets.

The presentations on LiveJournal's architecture cover this type of
thing....

http://danga.com/words/2005_oscon/oscon-2005.pdf

(Look at how they do 'user db clusters')

-Paul