Following on the heels of our memcached performance tests on SunFire X2270 ( Sun's Nehalem-based server) running OpenSolaris, we ran the same tests on the same server but this time on RHEL5. As mentioned in the post presenting the first memcached results, a 10GBE Intel Oplin card was used in order to achieve the high throughput rates possible with these servers. It turned out that using this card on linux involved a bit of work resulting in driver and kernel re-builds.

• With the default ixgbe driver from the RedHat distribution (version 1.3.30-k2 on kernel 2.6.18)), the interface simply hung during the benchmark test.
• This led to downloading the driver from the Intel site (1.3.56.11-2-NAPI) and re-compiling it. This version does …

Following on the heels of our memcached performance tests on SunFire X2270 ( Sun's Nehalem-based server) running OpenSolaris, we ran the same tests on the same server but this time on RHEL5. As mentioned in the post presenting the first memcached results, a 10GBE Intel Oplin card was used in order to achieve the high throughput rates possible with these servers. It turned out that using this card on linux involved a bit of work resulting in driver and kernel re-builds.

• With the default ixgbe driver from the RedHat distribution (version 1.3.30-k2 on kernel 2.6.18)), the interface simply hung during the benchmark test.
• This led to downloading the driver from the Intel site (1.3.56.11-2-NAPI) and re-compiling it. This version …

Following on the heels of our memcached performance tests on SunFire X2270 ( Sun's Nehalem-based server) running OpenSolaris, we ran the same tests on the same server but this time on RHEL5. As mentioned in the post presenting the first memcached results, a 10GBE Intel Oplin card was used in order to achieve the high throughput rates possible with these servers. It turned out that using this card on linux involved a bit of work resulting in driver and kernel re-builds.

• With the default ixgbe driver from the RedHat distribution (version 1.3.30-k2 on kernel 2.6.18)), the interface simply hung during the benchmark test.
• This led to downloading the driver from the Intel site (1.3.56.11-2-NAPI) and re-compiling it. This version …

A software-based distributed caching system such as memcached is an important piece of today's largest Internet sites that support millions of concurrent users and deliver user-friendly response times. The distributed nature of memcached design transforms 1000s of servers into one large caching pool with gigabytes of memory per node. This blog entry explores single-instance memcached scalability for a few usage patterns.

Table below shows out-of-the-box (no custom OS rewrites or networking tuning required) performance with 10G networking hardware and one single-socket UltraSPARC T2-based server with 8 cores and 8 threads per core (64 threads on a chip). All runs are done with a single memcached instance and 40 worker threads so that about 3 cores (24 threads) are used for the critical networking stack that is also heavily parallelized. 40+24 threads is a nice balance for this …

A software-based distributed caching system such as memcached is an important piece of today's largest Internet sites that support millions of concurrent users and deliver user-friendly response times. The distributed nature of memcached design transforms 1000s of servers into one large caching pool with gigabytes of memory per node. This blog entry explores single-instance memcached scalability for a few usage patterns.

Table below shows out-of-the-box (no custom OS rewrites or networking tuning required) performance with 10G networking hardware and one single-socket UltraSPARC T2-based server with 8 cores and 8 threads per core (64 threads on a chip). All runs are done with a single memcached instance and 40 worker threads so that about 3 cores (24 threads) are used for the critical networking stack that is also heavily parallelized. 40+24 threads is a nice balance for this …

A while back I looked at the Memcached UDF for MySQL, and noticed that it didn't use libmemcached in an optimal way. In order to work in a multithreaded environment it used the following pattern:

   memcached_st* clone = memcached_clone(NULL, memc);

   ... memcached operations using the clone ---   

   memcached_free(clone);

Well, that doesn't look bad, does it? Well, it isn't that bad, but if you look at the network traffic you will see that we end up connecting / disconnecting to the involved memcached servers every time, and memcached is not optimized for "single-shot" connections.

So how should you solve this? Well, you should reuse your clones! And luckily for you, you don't have to reinvent the wheel. Yesterday I pushed a patch to libmemcached introducing a new library: libmemcachedutil. The intention of that library is to put utility functions built on top of libmemcached …

What I really like about having Lua and MySQL Proxy together is that it turns out to be very flexible, you can have the proxy do all kinds of things. And the last thing I made the MySQL Proxy do is to act like memcached.

Well, maybe not, but it handles key => value pairs now :P




What does it do?

It handles 5 basic query types:

mysql> INSERT "key" = "value";

Very simple, insert a key => value pair on a proxy.global.db table, if there is already a value for that query, it will overwrite it.

mysql> SELECT "key";

It retrieves the value for the specified key.

mysql> DELETE "key";

Deletes the key …

I’ve packaged up and released version 1.1.2 of the Cacti templates I’ve written for MySQL, Apache, memcached, nginx etc.

Anyone who would like to help write documentation (or do anything else, for that matter) is welcomed to participate. I’ll give commit access at the drop of a hat.

Changelog:

2009-05-07: version 1.1.2

        * The parsing code did not handle InnoDB plugin / XtraDB (issue 52).
        * The servername was hardcoded in ss_get_by_ssh.php (issue 57).
        * Added Handler_ graphs (issue 47).
        * Config files can be used instead of editing the .php file (issue 39).
        * binary log space is now calculated without a MySQL query (issue 48).
        * There was no easy way to force inputs to be filled (issue 45).
        * Some graphs were partially hidden without --lower-limit (issue 43).
        * Flipped some elements across the …

As promised, here are more results running memcached on Sun's X2270 (Nehalem-based server). In my previous post, I mentioned that we got 350K ops/sec running a single instance of memcached at which point the throughput was hampered by the scalability issues of memcached. So we ran two instances of memcached on the same server, each using 15GB of memory and tested both 1.2.5 and 1.3.2 versions. Here are the results :

The maximum throughput was 470K ops/sec using 4 threads in memcached 1.3.2. Performance of 1.2.5 was just very slightly lower. At this throughput, the network capacity of the single 10gbe card was reached as the benchmark does a lot of small packet transfers. See my earlier post for a description of the server configuration and the benchmark. At the maximum …

As promised, here are more results running memcached on Sun's X2270 (Nehalem-based server). In my previous post, I mentioned that we got 350K ops/sec running a single instance of memcached at which point the throughput was hampered by the scalability issues of memcached. So we ran two instances of memcached on the same server, each using 15GB of memory and tested both 1.2.5 and 1.3.2 versions. Here are the results :

The maximum throughput was 470K ops/sec using 4 threads in memcached 1.3.2. Performance of 1.2.5 was just very slightly lower. At this throughput, the network capacity of the single 10gbe card was reached as the benchmark does a lot of small packet transfers. See my earlier post for a description of the server configuration and the benchmark. At the …