[nycbug-talk] soekris style boxes for memcached ?

[Bob Ippolito]

On 5/18/07, Peter Wright <pete at nomadlogic.org> wrote:
>
> > I need to scale up on my memcached size soon.
> >
> > Has anyone here seen or heard of soekris style boxes for memcached?
> >
> > Looking at the options , everything I've seen has been
> >       a_ people throw an extra 4gb of ram onto an existing machine, run
> > memcached on that
> >       b_ people buy a new low-end box and max it out with ram as a
> > dedicated box
> >
> > well, my boxes are maxed with ram, and while a low-end box makes
> > sense on many levels -- this seems like something so trivial that a
> > soekris style box could do cheaper, in less space, and with less
> > energy / heat
> >
> > just wondering if anyone has heard of anythig that could work.
>
> I may not understand exactly how memcached works but I assume the
> performance, and benfit, or memcached is tied to the system under which it
> runs on.  I.e., you most likely want a system that not only has the
> ability to house alot of RAM, but also has a fast bus for access to the
> RAM.  If running it on a remote system in production, I would assume you
> would want a GigE NIC capable of TCP offloading as well.
>
>
> this looks fun - i think it's got 2 em(4) NICs - but only supports up to
> 4Gb of DDR2/667Mhz RAM.
>
> http://www.abacus-ipc.com/mini_itx.htm

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

-bob