Memcached : In-Memory Caching System

Memcached is an in-memory key-value store for small chunks of arbitrary data (strings, objects) from results of database calls, API calls, or page rendering.

Memcached is a general-purpose distributed memory caching system that was originally developed by Danga Interactive for LiveJournal, but is now used by many other sites. It is often used to speed up dynamic database-driven websites by caching data and objects in RAM to reduce the number of times an external data source (such as a database or API) must be read. Memcached runs on Unix, Linux, Windows and Mac OS X and is distributed under a permissive free software license.

Memcached's APIs provide a giant hash table distributed across multiple machines. When the table is full, subsequent inserts cause older data to be purged in least recently used (LRU) order.

Architecture

 

 

 

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Who uses Memcache?

• YouTube
• Reddit
• Zynga
• Facebook
• Orange
• Twitter
• Wikipedia
• Heroku offers a managed memcached service built on Couchbase Server as part of their platform as a service.
• Google App Engine, AppScale, Windows Azure and Amazon Web Services also offer a memcached service through an API

Used For?

 

 

 

Pros

1) Reduces database load.

2) Perfect for websites with high database load.

3) Significantly reduces the number of retrieval requests to database

4) Cuts down the I/O access (hard disk)

Cons

1) Not a persistent data store.

2) Not a database.

3) Not application specific

4) Cannot cache large object

Configuring Memcached (For Ubuntu)

Step 1) Install Libevent

Memcached uses the Libevent library for network IO.

$ cd libevent-1.4.11-stable$ autoconf
$ ./configure --prefix=/usr/local
$ make
$ sudo make install

Step 2) Install Memcached

Download the latest version of Memcached from Danga.com who developed

Memcached originally for Livejournal.

$ cd memcached-1.4.0$ autoconf$ ./configure --prefix=/usr/local$ make$ sudo make install

Step 3) Run memcached

Start memcached as a daemon with 512MB of memory on port 11211(default).

Then you can telnet to the server and port and use any of the available commands.

$ memcached -d -m 512 127.0.0.1 -p 11211
$ telnet localhost 11211Trying ::1...
Connected to localhost.
Escape character is '^]'.get joe
ENDset joe 0 3600 10  (Note: TTL 3600 and 10 bytes)California
STOREDget joe
VALUE joe 0 10
California
END

Step 4) Spy Memcached (Memcached Java Client)

public class Users implements Serializable{

       private int id;

private String name ;

    // Getter and Setter methods

}

public class MemcachedDemo {

public static void main(String[] args) {

Users users = new Users();

users.setId(1);

users.setName("Sunil123");

try {

MemcachedClient c=new MemcachedClient(new InetSocketAddress("127.0.0.1", 1121));

               c.set("someKey_1", 2592000, users);

               Object myObject=c.get("someKey_1");

               System.out.println("Object 1: " + myObject);

               System.out.println("Statistics: " + c.getStats());

               System.out.println("Statistics of individual Items: " + c.getStats("items"));

               c.delete("someKey_2");

               c.shutdown();

               c=null ;

           } catch (IOException e) {

               e.printStackTrace();

           }

       }

}