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 …
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