The secret’s out (though of course it’s no secret at all to MySQL users): Memcached will do wonders for any website that must quickly serve up dynamic content to a rapidly growing number of users. Facebook, Twitter, Amazon and YouTube, among the busiest sites today, all rely on Memcached to help them scale out. And it’s well known that Memcached handles 120 million queries per second for Facebook.
These sites invest a lot of manpower into managing their ever increasing number of Memcached servers (some top 50 sites alone dedicates as much as 1/3 of its servers to running Memcached). While it is a fast in-memory caching system, Memcached itself does not scale easily – it over-utilizes expensive memory resources; it does not have an automatic fail over mechanism; it requires extra coding for replication and management. This is where the manpower comes in – to constantly monitor, optimize, and improve Memcached for scalability and high availability.
Not all web businesses, however, can afford (or want) the do-it-yourself route when it comes to Memcached. Answers.com, one of the web’s top 10 growth sites, did not want to be in the business of managing Memcached server sprawl or custom code maintenance. The site aggregates information on millions of topics from over 250 licensed sources, including Houghton Mifflin, Barron’s and Encyclopedia Britannica, and is constantly adding new community‐generated social content. There was only one option for Answers.com: Gear6 Web Cache, a Memcached distribution from Gear6 that has built-in replication, clustering, optimized memory utilization, and advanced management to take the guesswork out of deploying and maintaining a distributed caching tier.
In this session, Dan Marriott of Answers.com and Joaquin Ruiz of Gear6 will discuss the pros and cons of implementing Memcached on your own or going with a commercial solution. They’ll touch on how to:
Joaquin Ruiz is Executive Vice President of Products at Gear6. He is responsible for products, go-to-market activities and corporate development. Prior to Gear6, he was involved in the launch and growth of several other open source companies including Sistina (acquired by Red Hat), Zimbra (acquired by Yahoo), and Spikesource.
Dan Marriott is Director of Cloud Architecture at Ex Libris, a ProQuest company. As a technologist with over 25 years of professional experience in both the private and public sectors, he now specializes in high scalability and performance, designing and building server farms in Colo’s, internet infrastructure and data security.
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