ongoing � Database Helper

ongoing � Database Helper: Tim Bray: "I’ve been in a lot of Cloud-flavored discussions recently about what kind of Platform-as-a-Service offerings might hit sweet spots. On several occasions, People Who Should Know have said things like “A huge proportion of apps, even really big apps, can coast along just fine on a single MySQL instance with help frommemcached.” Some numbers crossed my radar today that would tend to support that theory; and they’re sort of astounding.

Check out Zoran Radovic’s Scaling Memcached: 500,000+ Operations/Second with a Single-Socket UltraSPARC T2. The title kind of says it: hundreds of thousands of ops per second, and a saturated 10G Ethernet link, with a 1U single-socket server. Now, benchmarks aren’t reality, but them are still some mind-boggling numbers.

Our Shanti Subramanyam has been mining the same territory with the new Nehalem boxes; see Memcached Performance on Sun's Nehalem System and Multi-instance memcached performance. And there were some even scarier numbers being bandied about on an internal email list; stay tuned.

But still, at the end of the day, that throughput on a single-socket box is the real news story, to my eye."