Overhead cost of single vs. multiple memcached connections?

[Patrick Galbraith]

Hi all,

I'm relatively new to memcached, and have been setting up our 
applications to use memcached as a front end cache, using the perl api 
for memcached. One of the questions that other developers in my 
organisation had was whether instantiating to use multiple connections 
to various memcached servers has much overhead vs. a single connection 
to the memcached server running on localhost, and if the performance 
gain of having a cache that spans several machines would be worth any 
cost of multiple connections?

I have been a proponent of using memcached, and the idea is simple 
enough that it speaks for itself, though I'm wondering if there are any 
published statistics showing performance gain using memcached by various 
people who have switched to using memcached?

One other question - is there a novel way to have it so you don't have 
to have IPs of the various memcached servers hard-coded in the memcached 
instantiation (perl) ? A configuration file, httpd.conf... etc?

Thanks in advance for any info!

-- 
Patrick Galbraith, Senior Programmer 
Grazr - Easy feed grazing and sharing
http://www.grazr.com 

Satyam Eva Jayate - Truth Alone Triumphs
Mundaka Upanishad