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Distributed Caching with Memcached
Cut the load on your Web site's database by adding a scalable object caching layer to your application.
Installing Memcached alone is no panacea; you have to do some work to use it. Profile your application and database queries to see where you're killing the most time and then cache from there. You also have to handle updating and purging your cache, because immediate cache coherency is important for most applications. If your application's internal API is already pretty clean, and you don't haphazardly hit the database all over your code, adding Memcached support should be easy. In your getter functions, simply try Memcached first. On a miss, hit the database and then populate Memcached. In your setter functions, update both the database and Memcached. You may find race conditions and cache coherency problems to deal with, but the Memcached API provides means to deal with them.
Memcached also is useful for storing data you don't really need to put on disk. For example, LiveJournal uses it to prevent accidental duplicate submissions of requests by storing the transaction's result code in Memcached, keyed by a transaction signature. Another example of Memcached as a primary data store, as opposed to a cache, is warding off dumb and/or malicious bots, often spammers. By keeping track of the last times and actions of each IP address and session, our code automatically can detect patterns and notify us of attacks early on, taking automatic action as necessary. Storing this information in the database would've been wasteful, burdening the disks unnecessarily. Putting it in memory is fine, however, because the data is safe to lose if a Memcached node fails.
I asked the mailing list what interesting things they're using Memcached for, and here's what they said:
Many people use it like we do on LiveJournal, as a typical cache for small Web objects.
One site is using it to pass the currently playing song from their Java streaming server to their PHP Web site. They used to use a database for this, but they report hitting Memcached is much nicer.
A lot of people are caching authentication info and session keys.
One person reported speeding up mail servers by caching known good and known bad hosts and authentication details.
I continue to receive interesting e-mails and suggestions, so I'm happy that people are finding good uses for it.
If you can get away with running your threaded application on a single machine and have no use for a global cache, you probably don't need Memcached. Likewise, SysV shared memory may work for you, if you're sitting on a single machine.
A few people have suggested that MySQL 4.x's query cache might negate the need for Memcached. The MySQL query cache is emptied every time a relevant table is updated in any way. It's mostly a feature useful for read-only sites. LiveJournal is incredibly write-heavy, as are most high-traffic sites nowadays. Also, as with other databases, the MySQL caches together can't exceed the maximum address space the kernel provides, usually 3GB on a 32-bit machine, which gets to be cramped.
Another option for some people is MySQL's in-memory table handler. It wasn't attractive for my uses because it's limited to fixed-length records, not allowing BLOB or TEXT columns. The total amount of data you can store in it also is limited, so we still would've needed to run a bunch of them and fan out keys amongst them.
I'd like to thank Anatoly Vorobey for all of his hard work on the Memcached server, Lisa Phillips for putting up with early crash-prone versions and all the users on the mailing list who have sent in patches, questions and suggestions.
Resources for this article: /article/7559.
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Comments
Very nice and informative
Very nice and informative article.
iehsan
http://iehsan.com
Does PHP and Java can set and get data from the same Memcached?
My system use both PHP and Java. Does PHP and Java can set and get data from the same Memcached without any error?
In my case, when PHP set data to Memcached with compression, Java can not decompress this data.
Could you help me?
Thank a lot for support.
how to configure mem cahce in centos 5.4
http://blogs.iehsan.com
http://pmedia4u.com
NCache-memcached
Memcached is an open-source distributed cache that speeds up applications by caching application data and reducing database load. Memcached is free but it has has limitations also. It has limitations in cache reliability availability and high availability, whch can cause serious problems for mission critical applications.
NCache-Memcached removes these limitations without requiring you abandon using the Memcached API and your investment in your existing code.
NCache-Memcached is 100% Memcached Compatible for .NET and Java and gives you Reliability thru Scalable Cache Replication.
Does NCache has client for Memcached?
Hi, i was just curious if NCache has client for Memcached... it had something for NHibernate... if they do this would be a great product to use for distributed caching
Does NCache has client for Memcached?
Yes , NCache does have a client for Memcached.
Josh.
Can you provide the distributed File system used in facebook
You have mentioned about the caching mechanism in facebook.. Is there any way I can know the distributed file system or file system being used in facebook scenario..
Gear6 Web Cache?
Can anyone with experience comment on the memcached distribution from Gear6? Thanks.
On the Gear6 memcached distribution
Hi! I'm the Director of Community Development for Gear6.
The Gear6 distribution of Memcached is a heavily modified fork of version 1.2 of the BSD licenced open source implementation of Memcached.
On a protocol level, it speaks the memcached text protocol. All existing memcached clients should Just Work. Implementation of the binary protocol is on our roadmap.
Unlike the community version of memcached, the Gear6 version is not intented to be run on whatever servers you have handy. Instead it is bundled into a rack mount appliance, and uses flash memory as a fast high density secondary cache as the available RAM fills up.
There are a couple of other features of the Gear6 implemention, including a web-based GUI, a REST based management API, and support for setting up High Availably pairs, so that a hardware failure does not cause a node failure in your memcached fleet.
If you want to play around with the Gear6 implementation, you can go to our website and download a VM image (this does not use flash, of course), or you can go to Amazon Web Services and start up specially bundled EC2 AMIs. Details on doing this are, of course, on our website.
Please do play with our product, and feel free to publicly post what you think of it.
Thanks!
.. Mark Atwood
if i have 3 server each
if i have 3 server each server has 1 GB of memory allocate for memcache, and if i using distibute memcache, it means 1 have 3 GB of allocate memcache?
Distributed Caching using NCache
NCache has been the caching solution of choice for various mission critical applications throughout the world since August 2005. Its scalability, high availability and performance are the reasons it has earned the trust of developers, senior IT and management personnel within high profile companies. These companies are involved in a range of endeavors including e-commerce, financial services, health services and airline services.
The range of features that NCache currently showcases is highly competitive and revolutionary. It supports dynamic clustering, local and remote clients, advanced caching topologies like replicated and mirrored, partitioned and replicated partitioned. It also provides an overflow cache, eviction strategies, read-through and write-through capabilities, cache dependencies, event notifications and object query language facilities. For a complete list of features and details please visit http://www.alachisoft.com/ncache/index.html.
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how to do distribut memcache
how to do distribut memcache in php? using memcache::addserver? i have tried it but cant work :( please advise thanks
It's very nice artice Thanks
It's very nice artice
Thanks for sharing this very good and helpful topic and comments
Hi, whenever I am storing
Hi,
whenever I am storing any data in the memcache server using PHP Memcache client or mysql UDF's , I am not able to retrieve the same value using Java client.
I am using Danga's memcache client.
can u tell me where could the problem be ??
great article
Great article on memcached.
There is a small confusion in my mind.
"Once the bucket number has been calculated, the list of nodes for that bucket is searched, looking for the node with the given key."
When you say "node" here you mean the actual elements entries in the hash/bucket, right? Node has been used earlier to refer to a machine on the network, as in, a web node. Hence the confusion. Thanks!
memcached is great !
hello ;]
It's very nice artice
memcached is very powerfull module
for website with high traffic
few days ago I intall it on my forum counter strike
before memcached i was have simtime load server over 200 :( and server was craching
now i have load 1-20
thx for memcached :)
thx for great artice :)
greetings, mosh
thanks a lot!
i'm looking for this kind of solution everywhere!
thanks a lot
Deployed a system using
Deployed a system using memcached through Hibernate. Pretty decent.
I still looking for a way to probe the memcached server. Is there a way you know of ?
Looking into mixing Mysql for read-only tables and memcached
Thx for the article
Cheers
memcached on a single server
Hi folks,
Is there a good php class that you can suggest for memcached operations like
class memcacheoperations {
function insert($q) {
// insert into memcache and insert into mysql blah..
}
}
I know i can make roll my own but im too lazy in these days
Memcache class available in PECL
http://us2.php.net/manual/en/ref.memcache.php is what you're looking for.
Alternatives
Beyond the alternatives mentioned above there are several other alternatives that are commonly used in Java world such as GigaSpaces, Terracota, Tangosol to name few. Some of those alternatives provides .Net and CPP support as well.
I happen to represent GigaSpaces so i can speak on its behalf.
GigaSpaces is used in many transactional systems today in very large clusters to store Terra bytes of data. It is used in mission critical systems such as trading applications, pre-paid applications that are mission critical i.e. it is tuned to support extensive write operations not just read mostly and yes it is also used for session replication, and scaling of large websites.
A free version is available through our Community-Edition, for more information refer to this page.
Beyond that we provide a complete Platfrom that provides a solution for the entire application scalability using a scale-out server model.
You can read more on our site
http://www.gigaspaces.com
Nati S.
can Java client be used with 'C' memcached server
Can a Java client be used against the 'C' version of memcached server or do I have to run a Java version of the memcached server?
If you are using Java you
If you are using Java you should probably look at one of the pure java alternatives that i mentioned above
Nati S.
I'm currently working for a
I'm currently working for a very big company with 200000000 accounts in the DB. With 6000000 hits per hour in special days.
Java client with the C memchaced works very well.
You can use Prevayler for jav
You can use Prevayler for java.
its persistence, auto recoverable, etc.
Re: Distributed Caching with Memcached
Speaking to Tim's concern, the Linux Virtual Server contributor Li Wang has kindly implemented an open source TCP handoff implementation for the Linux kernel. If you take such source code furthur you could conceivably ensure web requests transparently go to the right servers in the first place (to retrieve the content). There are paper detailing such tactics, one such paper by Eric Van Hensbergen is located here:
http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/vanhensbergen02knits.html
question
I use memcached to store my count data.and set
memcached -d -m 2048 -p 9876
after this i use php api to store my data.here is code:
<?php
include_once "MemCachedClient.inc.php";
$show;
$options["servers"] = array("*.*.*.*:9876");
$options["debug"] = false;
$memc = new MemCachedClient($options);
$path = "dongdong";
for ($i = 0; $i < 10000; $i ++)
{
$get = $memc->get($path);
if (!$get)
{
if ($i != 0)
{
echo "error ".$i."\n";
//continue;
break;
}
$memc->set($path, "1");
$show = 1;
}
else
{
echo $get."正确".$i."\n";
$show = $get + 1;
$memc->replace($path, $show);
}
}
?>
All is ok, but when i run to 1988, the cycle break, i tried more times.all failed.why?
here is the bug:
MemCache: replace dongdong = 10952
sock_to_host(): Failed to connect to 192.168.241.109:9876
sock_to_host(): Host 192.168.241.109:9876 is not available.
sock_to_host(): Host 192.168.241.109:9876 is not available.
sock_to_host(): Host 192.168.241.109:9876 is not available.
Re: Distributed Caching with Memcached
Interesting, but could someone please fix the missing image?
http://www.linuxjournal.com/7451f1.png does not exist!
Thank You
distributed HASHing
You might be interested in the distributed hash stuff in
Chord. I think it's related to what you're doing with memcached. You might be able to use those ideas to improve the two level hash.
Re: Distributed Caching with Memcached
Memcached's big claim is that it's faster than a database, which may well be true. But with no local caching, it certainly can't compete with a true distributed memory system like those commonly used in supercomputers. With memcached, if you have a data item which is needed on every web request, then that data item will be sent across the network from the same server on every request.
Memcached also has a lingering problem with slabs reassignment. If your application uses one particular size class heavily, and doesn't use another size class, then writes to the unused size class (when they eventually occur) will fail. The daemon can't automatically recover memory from the other slabs for use in an empty slab. Similarly, it's not a true LRU cache, the item dropped will always be an item from the same slab. The lifetime of an item in the cache is skewed due to differing amounts of memory allocated to each slab after a restart.
At Wikipedia, we've also had perennial problems with writes failing, probably due to high load from other processes on the server leading to a connection timeout. This is unfortunate when the write is an important cache invalidation operation.
Tim Starling (Wikipedia developer)
At Wikipedia, we've also
"At Wikipedia, we've also had perennial problems with writes failing, probably due to high load from other processes on the server leading to a connection timeout. This is unfortunate when the write is an important cache invalidation operation."
Tim you can use In Memory Data Grid for exactly that purpose i.e. In Memory Data Grids can be used as the system of records and therefore handle writes as well as reads and do the synchronization with your data base as a background process - I refer to this as Persistence as a Service (PaaS).
Nati S.
GigaSpaces
Write Once Scale Anywhere
in regards to the comments by Tim Starling
That's why you use something like Tangosol Coherence instead.. It has various caching topologies like near-cache, replicated, partitioned - and has distributed locking when needed. Moreover, it implements a cache-loader mechanism and can be used as a write back cache.
It's not free - and it's a Java only product. It would be nice if the memcache developers look at it's feature set and use it as a roadmap.