Netuality

No self-respecting geek can resist either of these incredible temptations:

• Correct something wrong on “the internets”
• Produce a little bit of graphviz candy (what a fantastic tool)

Read the rest of this entry »

This presentation was planned for an older Wurbe event, but as this never quite happened in the last 4 months I am publishing it now, before it becomes totally obsolete.

My original contribution here is a comparison between the original memcached server from Danga and the tugela fork from the MediaWiki programmers. I’ve also tried memcachedb but the pre 1.0 version (from Google Code) in November 2007 was quite unstable and unpredictible.

In a nutshell, these memcache versions are using BerkeleyDB instead of memory slab allocator. There are 2 direct consequences:

• when the memory is large enough for the whole cache, database-backed servers will be slower (my tests shown 10-15% which might be tolerable – or not – for your app)
• when you’ve got lots of data to cache and your server’s memory is low, relying on bdb is significantly better than letting the swap mechanism to do its job (from my benchmarks, the difference can go up to 10 times faster especially under very high concurrency conditions)

Tugela will prove especially useful when running it on virtualized servers with very low memory.

My tests were performed with the “Tummy” Python client and Stackless for the multithreaded version. In one of the following weeks I’ll update the benchmarks for memcachedb 1.0.x – and I promise never ever to wait 4 months for a presentation, again …

Wurbe is the informal web developers meeting group, from Bucharest Romania. Meeting #5 was focused on automated testing (unit, TDD, BDD, other stuff). This is my presentation: