No clue if we¹re the largest installation, but Facebook has roughly 200 dedicated memcached servers in its production environment, plus a small number of others for development and so on. A few of those 200 are hot spares. They are all 16GB 4-core AMD64 boxes, just because that¹s where the price/performance sweet spot is for us right now (though it looks like 32GB boxes are getting more economical lately, so I suspect we¹ll roll out some of those this year.)
We have a home-built management and monitoring system that keeps track of all our servers, both memcached and other custom backend stuff. Some of our other backend services are written memcached-style with fully interchangeable instances; for such services, the monitoring system knows how to take a hot spare and swap it into place when a live server has a failure. When one of our memcached servers dies, a replacement is always up and running in under a minute. All our services use a unified database-backed configuration scheme which has a Web front-end we use for manual operations like adding servers to handle increased load. Unfortunately that management and configuration system is highly tailored to our particular environment, but I expect you could accomplish something similar on the monitoring side using Nagios or another such app. All that said, I agree with the earlier comment on this list: start small to get some experience running memcached in a production environment. It¹s easy enough to expand later once you have appropriate expertise and code in place to make things run smoothly. -Steve On 5/3/07 8:06 AM, "Sam Lavery" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Does anyone know what the largest installation of memcached currently is? I'm > considering putting it on 100+ machines(solaris/mod_perl), and would love to > hear any tips people have for managing a group of that size(and larger). > Additionally, are there any particular patches I should try out for this > specific platform? > > > Thanks in advance, > Sam > > > >
