![Sample Ruby code
• Connection:
– With one server:
M = MemCache.new ‘localhost:11211’, :namespace
=> ‘my_namespace’
– With multiple servers:
M = MemCache.new %w[one.example.com:11211
two.example.com:11211], :namespace =>
‘my_namespace’](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/memcached-101110130518-phpapp01/85/Memcached-Presentation-13-320.jpg)
![Sample Ruby code
• Memcache can store data of any data types.
– m = MemCache.new('localhost:11211')
– m.set ‘my_string’, ‘Hello World !’
– m.set ‘my_integer’, 100
– m.set ‘my_array’, [1,”hello”,”2.0”]
– m.set ‘my_hash’, {‘1’=>’one’,’2’=>’two’}
– m.set ‘my_complex_data’, <any complex data>](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/memcached-101110130518-phpapp01/85/Memcached-Presentation-16-320.jpg)
Memcached Presentation
- 1. MEMCACHED An Overview Quick overview and best practices - Asif Ali / Oct / 2010 / azifali@gmail.com Image courtesy: memcached offical website
- 2. “The Disk is the new tape!” Quoted from somewhere
- 3. What is memcache? • Simple in memory caching system • Can be used as a temporary in-memory data store • Stores data in-memory only. • Excellent read performance. • Great write performance. • Data distribution between multiple servers. • API available for most languages
- 4. Memcache • NO – acid, data structures, etc etc. • If you’re looking for a replacement for your DB then you’re looking at the wrong solution. • Simple “put” a data using a key • Get the data using the key. • Generally, your app remembers the key. • Data typically expires or gets flushed out (so has a short life). • Does not auto commit to disk
- 5. When should I use memcached? • When your database is optimized to the hilt and you still need more out of it. – Lots of SELECTs are using resources that could be better used elsewhere in the DB. – Locking issues keep coming up • When table listings in the query cache are torn down so often it becomes useless • To get maximum “scale out” of minimum hardware
- 6. Use cases for memcached • Anything what is more expensive to fetch from elsewhere, and has sufficient hit rate, can be placed in memcached • Web Apps that require extremely fast reads • Temporary data storage • Global data store for your application data • Session data (ROR) • Extremely fast writes of any application data (that will be committed to an actual data store later) • Memcached is not a storage engine but a caching system
- 7. NoSQL & SQL • We’re not going to debate about the pros and cons of the different NoSQL vs SQL solutions. • My View: It really depends upon your requirements. • NoSQL caters to large but specific problems and in my opinion, there is no all in one solution. • Your comfort of MySQL or SQL statements might not solve certain scale problems
- 8. For Example • If you have hundreds of Terra Bytes of data and would like to process it, then clearly – Map Reduce + Hive would be a great solution for it. • If you have large data and would like to do real time analytics / queries where processing speed is important then you might want to consider Cassandra / MongoDB • If your app needs massive amounts of simple reads then clearly memcached is probably the solution of choice • If you want large storage of data with non aggregate processing and very comfortable with MySQL then a MySQL based sharded solution can do wonders.
- 10. Memcached Server Info • Memcache server accepts read / write TCP connections through a standalone app or daemon. • Clients connect on specific ports to read / write • You can allocate a fixed memory for memcached to use. • Memcached stores data in the RAM (of course!) • Memcached uses libevent and scales pretty well (theoritical limit 200,000)
- 11. Configuration options • Max connections • Threads • Port number • Type of process – foreground or daemon • Tcp / udp
- 12. Read write (Pseudo code) • Set “key”, “value”, ”expire time” • A = get “key”
- 13. Sample Ruby code • Connection: – With one server: M = MemCache.new ‘localhost:11211’, :namespace => ‘my_namespace’ – With multiple servers: M = MemCache.new %w[one.example.com:11211 two.example.com:11211], :namespace => ‘my_namespace’
- 14. Sample Ruby code • Usage – m = MemCache.new('localhost:11211') – m.set 'abc', 'xyz‘ – m.get 'abc‘ => ‘xyz’ – m.replace ‘abc’, ‘123’ – m.get ‘abc’ => ‘123’ – m.delete ‘abc’ => ‘DELETED’ – m.get ‘abc’ => nil
- 15. Memcached data structure • Generally simple strings • Simple strings are compatible with other languages. • You can also store other objects example hashes. • Complex data stored using one language generally may not be fetchable from different systems
- 16. Sample Ruby code • Memcache can store data of any data types. – m = MemCache.new('localhost:11211') – m.set ‘my_string’, ‘Hello World !’ – m.set ‘my_integer’, 100 – m.set ‘my_array’, [1,”hello”,”2.0”] – m.set ‘my_hash’, {‘1’=>’one’,’2’=>’two’} – m.set ‘my_complex_data’, <any complex data>
- 17. Limits of memcached • Keys can be no more then 250 characters • Stored data can not exceed 1M (largest typical slab size) per key • There are generally no limits to the number of nodes running memcache • There are generally no limits the the amount of RAM used by memcache over all nodes – 32 bit machines do have a limit of 4GB though
- 18. FEATURES
- 19. Memcached can replicate for high availability Memcached 1 Data structure A Memcached 2 Copy of Data structure A
- 20. Data can be distributed using memcached Memcached 1 Part 1 - Data structure A Memcached 2 Part - 2 The connecting client can connect to either memcached 1 or memcached 2 to fetch any data that is distributed across the two servers
- 21. Memcached can store any object • Simple String • Hash • Other • Strings can be read / written among heterogenous systems.
- 23. Best Practices • Allocate enough space for memcached. • Memcache does not auto save data into disk so don’t forget to serialize your data if you need to. • A memcached crash could lead to a large downtime if you have to load a lot of data to load (into memcache) so you should – Replicate memcached data OR – Find algorithms to store data as fast as you can OR – Have redundant servers with similar data and handle “no data” situation well.
- 24. Best Practices • Shared nothing, non replicated set of servers works the best. • Don’t try to replicate your database environment into Memcached. It is not what it was meant for. • Don’t store data for too long in memcached. Least recently used items (LRU) are evicted automatically in certain scenarios. • Reload data that is required for your reads as often as possible • Don’t go just by existing benchmarks; Find out your application benchmarks in your environment and use that variable to scale.
- 25. What to look out for • Memcached performance can hit roadblocks under very high reads and writes on a single instance so try to isolate read / write instances or see what works best for your app. • Data increments on memcache values – remember this is a shared memory space and data is not always “locked” before being updated.
- 27. Usage History • Considered using memcached more than 2 years ago due to problems in high volumen MySQL read and writes. • Used it first as a way to store Mongrel’s session variables instead of MySQL.
- 28. The Problem we tried to solve • Deliver a matching ad to a complex set of variables • 6000+ devices in device db. • 8-10m records in ip data • Country / carrier / manufacturer / channel / targeting • IP filters, black lists • Bot Filtering • Ad moderation etc etc etc.. • Typical In an ad network scenario
- 29. The solution needed to • Make data fetching as fast as possible • Make data structures simple • Make processing extremely simple (for example a string comparision vs a SQL Query) • Make processing of data as fast as possible. • Complete all processing 50 ms or less.
- 30. ..continued • Using a database was possible in low traffic scenario. • Traffic grew and so did database nightmares.
- 31. Our usage of memcached • Hundreds of millions of reads daily; small chunks of data. Infrequent writes. • More than 60G of memcached shared data space. • MySQL was fine until we moved our performance metric from seconds to ms. • Current total transaction time between 21- 50ms.
- 33. Memcached clients currently used • http://deveiate.org/code/Ruby-MemCache/ • http://github.com/higepon/memcached-client • There are newer and better clients that can be used.
- 34. Questions?