[nycbug-talk] soekris style boxes for memcached ?

[Jonathan Vanasco]

On May 18, 2007, at 5:52 PM, Bob Ippolito wrote:
> Some of the big memcached users like Facebook [1] are doing amd64 with
> 16+GB RAM per box.
>
> memcached is basically just a big hash table that people use for
> caching data (it's not redundant or anything, but you can code that at
> the application level). The bottleneck is usually the network and the
> amount of RAM you have, it really doesn't do much with the CPU.
>
> [1] http://lists.danga.com/pipermail/memcached/2007-May/004098.html

Well Facebook has virtually unlimited funds, hot spares ready to go,  
and a 'sweet spot' for performance and price.  I have a teeny budget.

My idea is that since it basically needs little operational overhead  
on the OS & hardware, virtually no disk space, and a ton of RAM -- an  
embedded box should be able to handle it.  But I've never benched it  
on older hardware that is closer to the design of embedded pcs.

On May 18, 2007, at 5:49 PM, alex at pilosoft.com wrote:
> I think a better idea is to have a single box with *lots* of memory  
> than
> bunch of boxes with a little bit. Note that more recent hardware can
> address more and more memory. Example, soekris (except the latest  
> 500mhz
> ones) are 256M soldered. 5501 soekris can do 1G soldered.

I know the soekris boxes maxed out on a low RAM, but i figured that  
there's got to be some other low power box out there that is similar  
and uses regular RAM, capable of 4 1GB or 4GB sticks.

A single box with a ton of memory works if you can start off with two  
machines or a farm -- you have redundancy via the cluster.  But if  
you're a bootstrapped startup , 2x 4GB machines looks a lot more  
attractive than 1 8GB -- because I know I'll have a box down at some  
point , and my applications depend on offloading db tasks.

> then there's things like ddrdrive and i-ram
> 4*1G on each card, stick 5 of them into a server, done/DONE
>
> now that I think about it, the last idea is probably the best $/mb
The i-ram stuff looks interesting.  i was actually looking at the old- 
style ram extender pci cards to max out available ram.

that makes me think ghat you could probably do something similar to  
memcached using mysql & isam on a bunch of machines configured with  
the i-ram.  you wouldn't get the clustering benefits of memcached,  
but you could assign keys to different servers at the application level.

even simpler -- there might be some freebsd/linux package that will  
let you create a ramdisk/virtual memory on an i-ram partition.   
virutal memory on a virtual hard drive is probably a bit too scary to  
trust though.


// Jonathan Vanasco

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