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In praise of memcached

jchri.st

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Re: In praise of memcached

#111
Memcached was a savior for caching when it launched. I love that it was created in 2003 by Brad Fitzpatrick for LiveJournal. Each post on a users feed could have different access restrictions, and this allowed posts (or entire pages) to be cached.

I used it with Ruby on Rails for many years. It sped up pages, and just worked.

The downside (and upside for speed) is (and always was) that cache was saved in memory not disk. This meant hosting would be expensive if you have a large scale site with a wide amount of data to cache.

Solid cache has been a savior for those cases for me. We have over 100gb of cache for a project I'm working on, and it's stored in postgres on disk, with fast lookups with an index and expirations that happen automatically in Rails to delete those rows.

If I had a smaller cache need and was already using Redis, I'd probably just use that. But if speed was the number 1 factor, and I'd try benchmarking Memcached vs Redis.

Re: In praise of memcached

#112
post #82
post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Communication itself isn't free, after all" Off topic, but that's my problem with microservices, devs seem to be totally unaware of this.

That's a decade old take. I don't think people are doing microservices and more.

oh yeah definitely glad we have no more microservices in prod anywhere, that would be a mess

Re: In praise of memcached

#113

Burning memory for a pure memory/RAM service like memcached in today's environment is not going to work given the price of memory and especially for larger customers. Especially in cloud environments, it's going to be inordinately expensive so having hybrid solutions like Redis and their flash memory solution is probably going to be the compromise going forward.

Seems that it is already supported: https://docs.memcached.org/features/flashstorage/
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