October 2008
Intermediate to advanced
434 pages
12h 7m
English
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Advanced Caching with Nginx and memcached
—Ilya Grigorik (see his bio in Contributors)
Problem
I’ve built a popular destination (or an API server), and now I need to handle several thousand requests a second, but I don’t have the time to rearchitect my code, or worse, rewrite in a faster language.
Solution
Memcached, the darling of every web developer, is capable of turning almost any application into a speed demon. No matter which language you’re working in, your application server is usually the slowest part of the chain: no application server is faster than any web server, even if yours is written in C.
Nginx, a very popular HTTP and reverse-proxy server, by default comes prepackaged with a memcached module, which allows us to bypass the application server and serve cached responses from memcached directly. With minimal code changes, we’ve implemented this technique for AideRSS API servers, and immediately saw our request throughput improve by 400%—from 800 req/s to 3,700 req/s!
Discussion
Most popular open source web servers can be configured to serve cached data quickly and directly from one or more memcached server instances, rather than from your filesystem or an application server. Apache (see http://code.google.com/p/modmemcachecache/) and Lighttpd (http://trac.lighttpd.net/trac/wiki/Docs) require additional modules to enable this functionality, whereas Nginx (http://wiki.codemongers.com/Main) comes with native support and offers the most flexible implementation. A relative newcomer ...
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O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.Amir M.
I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.