Multiple nodes vs multiple servers

[Steve Grimm]

On 5/10/07 11:09 AM, "Dustin Sallings" <dustin at spy.net> wrote:
>   No, I don't wait, but with a single connection to memcached (where "single"
> may be substituted with a small number), requests naturally stack up and can
> be merged.  Write buffers can pull from all queued events.  Reducing the
> number of packets moved around the network for requests would seem like it
> should increase performance.

Yes, absolutely it will, both from a server CPU point of view (multi-get is
much more efficient than get) and, if you're really pushing a lot of
traffic, from a network capacity point of view. So you're saying the
batching only happens when the socket buffer on your memcached connection is
full and you have to hang on to data and wait for the connection to become
writeable again anyway? That makes sense. (Yes, sorry, I know I could just
go look at the code...)

I think it isn't something we ever considered because the ratio of number of
memcached hosts to number of client processes on any single client machine
here is pretty high; the chances of enough separate client processes on one
host needing to write enough requests to the same memcached host at the same
time to clog up a connection are pretty slim. But if your number of clients
per host is much higher than your number of memcached servers, then that
wouldn't be so true.

>   It's interesting that you tried this.  Do you still have the proxy
> application available?  It may be a good starting point for my experiments,
> and it may not be as optimal as what I'm thinking.

We do still have it, and the plan from the start was to release it as open
source at some point. Since it ended up being less useful than we thought it
would be, I didn't finish the prep work for that. It still needs a bit of
cleaning up (not to mention documentation) before I'd be comfortable
unleashing it on the world. If people are really interested I'll see what I
can do, but don't expect it tomorrow or anything.

-Steve